Bon of the Vanity Fairs
Below, 63 pieces of candy from Condé (Nast) c. 1914-1936, largely Vanity Fair covers with a few early Vogue and House and Garden numbers as well.
The lush hermetic aestheticism of the 1910s, in all its ritual harlequinade, peacockery, stained-glass Tiffany washes of chromatic incandescence, sinuous Art Nouveau curves, flourishes of Japoniste exotica, and cameos out of C18 France, gave way over the postwar years to ongoing eruptions into the garden party of the social and artistic earthquakes and flashes of heat lightning outside, in the forms of boxy geometric modernism, burly big-shouldered industrialism, social satire and, into the 1930s, the lengthening shadows of Depression, the multiple risings of Eurasian fascism, and prophetic glimpses of the total-war reprise of 1914-1918 to come three years after the 1936 folding of Vanity Fair.
Owing to louche and sybaritic predilections dating from the womb, and a shuddering horror before crass topicality in any form not to do with what I had for breakfast, I have, with a few exceptions toward the end, excluded the latter sort of sharp-elbowed roundhead incursions in serial deference to both my cavalier's goatee and my libido for moonlit visual perfume of all kinds. After the 1910s and even within them, strict chronology is by no means assured.
DSL.
















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