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Feathers, Furs, Pearls: 1920

Washington, D.C., circa 1920. "Miss Helen LeSeure." Granddaughter of "Uncle Joe" Cannon, a legendary Speaker of the House. Harris & Ewing. View full size.

Washington, D.C., circa 1920. "Miss Helen LeSeure." Granddaughter of "Uncle Joe" Cannon, a legendary Speaker of the House. Harris & Ewing. View full size.

 

On Shorpy:
Today’s Top 5

The greatest hat

EVER!!!

Even by today's standards

She's hot!

"Conspicuous Consumption"

The term was introduced by economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen in his 1899 book "The Theory of the Leisure Class."

Spit Curl

I remember my mother, who was born in 1902, telling me about these styles. The little curl sticking down from under the hat was called a spit curl because you'd moisten your finger and press it against your forehead to make it stay. The feathers are called a "bird of paradise". These were also worn sometimes sticking up from a head-band and held by an ornament at the middle forehead.

Soft focus

According to the 1900 census, she was born in December 1899 (lived in Uncle Joe's house, as a matter of fact). She would have been around twenty years old. So the photographer's blurriness must have had some other objective.

["Soft" was the aesthetic of the era when it came to studio portraits. Negatives like this were often blurred when they were printed for an even more impressionistic effect. The goal seems to have been images that were equal parts painterly and photographic. - Dave]

Natural Resources

Don't know if she got her fur from a mink, fox or a rodent, but the pearls are from the ocean and the feathers are obviously from some flying creature, so she is probably not adorned in man-made synthetics and can still be called a "natural woman." She can also be a cover girl for "Fin and Feather." I'm not sure about the wisdom of decorating oneself with deceased animal life and personally have absolutely no complaints about polyester even though it is disdained by the hipper people. It is machine washable, never needs ironing and wears like iron. What's not to like? Of course it did not exist in 1920 and since this was before the Great Depression, conspicuous consumption by status seekers was all the rage among affluent flappers. (Don't mean to plug Vance Packard's writing, purely unintentional.)

So

unnecessarily blurry. Unless it turns out she was really 95 years old here.

I think

she looks absolutely lovely in that outfit and her face is adorable.

Didn't she invent canned baby peas???

Transcriptionist extraordinaire

Helen LeSeure Abdill acquired her own bit of immortality when she transcribed her Uncle Joe's memoirs from his days as Speaker.

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