Word: victorian
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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There have been other ages when, in the name of art, the female figure has been cruelly repressed, e.g., in Victorian England, rigidly laced in its own stays, in China, where for 700 years women's feet were bound, and in the U.S. in the 1920s, when fashion decreed that women must be breastless...
High Life. Fortunino Matania came to Britain at the end of the Victorian era, when he was 19. The son of an Italian illustrator, he was trained to magazine work and covered the kinds of auspicious occasions now assigned to photographers. His first big job for a British journal was the coronation of Edward VII. "Rapidity and accuracy, that was what mattered," says Matania. He had both, and British editors kept him hopping for the next 25 years. In World War I, he spent four years in the trenches, sent out thousands of drawings that established...
Lace on Her Petticoat (by Aimée Stuart; produced by Herman Shumlin) is a garrulous trifle from England about Victorian existence in Scotland. Harking back to the days of ironclad class distinctions and almost exultant snobbery, it chronicles the brief, foredoomed friendship that springs up between little Alexandra Carmichael, whose mother is a marchioness, and little Elspeth McNairn, whose widowed mother makes the marchioness' hats. Mrs. McNairn herself is courted by a workingman who drinks tea with his spoon in his cup; but though his spoon is in the wrong place, his heart is in the right...
Probably without analyzing it, the Victorian woman felt impelled to cover herself with layer upon heavy layer of elegant materials, awkwardly expanded with hoops and bustles, to help her personality compete with the cluttered detail of her rooms. The woman of today . . . can sparkle, even in a simple sheath gown, without fear that the elegance of her personality and appearance will be lost...
...have changed the locale, period and much of the plot, it is still the amusing story of a pair of elegant swindlers preying on a group of social snobs who turn out to be just as fraudulent, in their own way, as the crooks. The culprits team up in Victorian London, where one is the perfect lady's maid (Greer Garson), the other a scampish, penniless aristocrat (Michael Wilding). Moving on to gullible San Francisco, where wealthy climbers are eager to fawn on English nobility, the maid passes for a marchioness and the blue blood for the perfect butler...