"A Real Physical Type"

Leafing through the Sept. 15 issue of Vogue, British Author George Orwell, literary critic (Dickens, Dali and Others) and political satirist (Animal Farm), ran across a picture of himself in Vogue's "spotlight," found himself described as a "plain speaker" and a "direct writer." Leafing a little more, he generated some direct thoughts on U.S. fashions, women and mores. Last week the New Republic printed them:

"[The] . . . magazine . . . consists of 325 large quarto pages, of which no less than 15 are given up to articles on world politics, literature, etc. The rest consists entirely of pictures ... of ball dresses, mink coats, step-ins, panties, brassieres, silk stockings, slippers, perfumes, lipstick, nail polish--and, of course, of the women, unrelievedly beautiful, who wear them or make use of them.

"One striking thing, when one looks at these pictures, is the overbred, exhausted, even decadent style of beauty that now seems to be striven after. Nearly all of these women are immensely elongated. A thin-boned, ancient-Egyptian type of face seems to predominate: narrow hips are general, and slender, nonprehensile hands like those of a lizard are quite universal. Evidently it is a real physical type. . . ."

Pet-Smooth. "Another striking thing is the prose style of the advertisements, an extraordinary mixture of sheer lushness with clipped and sometimes very expensive technical jargon. Words like suave-mannered, custom-finished, contour-conforming, mitt-back, innersole, backdip, midriff, swoosh, swash, curvaceous, slenderize and pet-smooth are flung about with evident full expectation that the reader will understand them at a glance.

"A fairly diligent search through the magazine reveals two discreet allusions to grey hair, but if there is anywhere a direct mention of fatness or middle-age I have not found it. Birth and death are not mentioned either: nor is work, except that a few recipes for breakfast dishes are given.

"The male sex enters directly or indirectly into perhaps one advertisement in twenty, and photographs of dogs or kittens appear here and there. In only two pictures, out of about three hundred, is a child represented.

"On the front cover there is a colored photograph of the usual elegant female, standing on a chair while a grey-haired, spectacled, crushed-looking man in shirtsleeves kneels at her feet, doing something to the edge of her skirt. If one looks closely one finds that actually he is about to take a measurement with a yardstick. But to a casual glance he looks as though he were kissing the hem of the woman's garment--not a bad symbolical picture of American civilization, or at least of one important side of it."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.