Virtual Tour

Here is a wonderful virtual tour of a made-to-measure factory in Chicago. It was printed in a 1910 issue of The Clothier and Furnisher. 

Fashion Victim

Looking trendy is not always easy, especially when being the pinnacle of fashion means adopting extreme styles, like the close-fitting, perfectly crisp, and perfectly unforgiving stiff collars of the 1910s and 1920s. When starched to their limit, they could render their wearer quite uncomfortable, and, according to a few contemporary reports, sometimes even constricted gentlemen to the brink of faintness. 

A major draw-back to extreme trends, is that when they are in full swing, it becomes much more difficult for those who wish to be stylish and practical, to find products that are both. 

Example: An ad by J.C. Leyendecker,   

Note the cutting fit of the stiff collar.

Mr. Art Helfant weighs in on the situation, in a 1921 issue of The Haberdasher:

It's no wonder that through the 1920s, soft collars slowly began to gain in popularity, and by the 1930s, their conquest of collardom was virtually complete. Infact, the same issue, in which Mr. Helfant's cartoon was printed, contains an article with the following headline: 

Vogue

In 1921, a men's jewelry company moved their headquarters from 5th Avenue to Madison Avenue. Their name was "Vogue" Jewelry for Men, and their logo includes a typeface, strangely similar to the one used today, on the cover of a certain famous magazine. According to the ad below, printed in an issue of The Haberdasher, the store was run by four brothers, and was founded in 1890. I was curious to find out more about "Vogue," so I did a little digging:  

I unearthed another ad for the store in a 1908 issue of The Clothier and Furnisher. It appears that they were not a retailer, but rather, a jewelry house, producing their own lines of fobs, pins, links, clasps, and buttons:

After some more digging, I found the following notice, printed in The Boy's Outfitter from 1920. It describes "Vogue" as a wholesale endeavor: 

But what became of them? It took a bit more searching to find information from later than 1921, but after poking around for a while, I discovered two Vogel Brothers Company. inc. patents from 1926, listed in the Index of Patents Issued from the United States Patent and Trademark Office:

Earrings? Did I read that correctly? For sailors, perhaps? 

Unfortunately, after the patent listings, a clear trail (at least on the internet) seemed to run out. and I can't seem to find any images of the jewelry that the produced. Perhaps more information will turn up.

Behold the Bohemian Youth

This article from a 1919 issue of The Haberdasher provides a wonderful sketch of a perennial type: The glassy-eyed youth with poetic sensibilities, who drifts through life in a state of rapt abstraction, passively gaining the admiration of all aspiring bohemians he encounters, and thoroughly confounding everyone else.  

Riverboat Gamblers

Another Outing for the Knit Goods Selling Agents was reported in the September issue of The Underwear & Hosiery Review. It seems like the underwear and hosiery men enthusiastically repurposed the boat, charted for their event, transforming it into an impromptu casino!

From the two pages of snapshots, it looks like they had a grand old time! Below is the complete report: 

Prize-Winning Prototypes

Like the stock market, the fashionable male's waistline has a tendency to go up and down over the decades, and in the early 1920s it momentarily alighted somewhere near three quarters of the way down the fashionable male's ribcage. 

Below are three prize winning jackets by H. Daroff and Son.'s designer, Pietro Yantorno. Note how, on Yantorno's third prize model, that the waist suppression begins almost right under the arms, and on the belted model (lower left), by Dryfous and Lang's designer, Gus Reinhardt, the belt seems to be placed right above the point of the elbow. 

I'm guessing that these high-waisted jackets were a real joy for naturally short-waisted gentlemen. Their particular physique had not been a trendy one in western fashion, for at least a century. Finally in the late 1910s and early 1920s, they could purchase ready-made jackets, that were cut to be the narrowest, right where they were naturally the slimmest.       

Speaking of slim, in the following collection of jackets by international designers, one can see some fine examples of the "marked tendency to waisty effects" mentioned by " The Baron." in 1921.  

Majoring in Taste

I found this charming little illustration (by Forbell) and excerpt from an article by Richard C. Bohem, summarizing 1922 style trends on college campuses. In the first part of the article, Bohem discusses the disparity between the way college boys were portrayed on the stage (often loudly dressed, and a little sloppy), and actual campus fashion, which consisted mostly of comfortable, tidy, looks, with an occasional preppy, or fashion-forward perspective. After mentioning sportswear, and sack coats, which had become a college staple, the article is concluded with the following: