With Victorian Lady Barbie, for instance, we see necklaces, a fan, perfume bottles, and a table set for tea;
Gibson Girl is provided with a cameo, an advertisement for boots, and some paper dolls; Elizabethan Queen gets a ruff, a crown, jewelry of varying kinds, and a pair of gloves.
The
Gibson Girl remained the image of American beauty until World War I, when the flapper became the vanguard of fashionableness, prompting the late Dr.
This theme is repeated throughout Buszek's subsequent explorations of pin-ups through the turn of the century, as images of the feminist New Woman appeared in popular culture as the
Gibson Girl and in theatrical performances like those of Sarah Bernhardt.
It is important to remember, Hunter points out, that the icon of the New Woman, "The
Gibson Girl," was, in fact, a girl.
The suntanned, even red-faced Outdoor Girl replaced the soft, pale
Gibson Girl when women took up automobile driving.
Inspired by working women's clothing, by sports dress--such as riding costumes--and by other activities that took place outside fully public realms in which women were subjected to disapproving male gazes, this look became further legitimated in the late nineteenth century with the popularization of the shirt-waisted
Gibson Girl.
According to Kitch, the
Gibson Girl was the blueprint for the commercial female stereotype in mass media.
A recurrent image shows a pretty young
Gibson girl turning away her face while, when looked at from another mental angle, she metamorphoses into a crone shrouded in a babushka.
For example, photographs show that the four sisters were quite light-skinned, and secondary sources suggest that they routinely appeared on stage in "
Gibson girl" dresses with blonde pompadours.
The emergence of the Follies Girl coincided with that of a number of other Girls - the Chores Girl, the Christy Girl, the
Gibson Girl - and all of them made selective use of another multivalent image - the New Woman.
Gibson Girls and Suffragists: Perceptions of Women from 1900 to 1918.
The Lillian Russell collection is named after the glamorous light-opera star who was the toast of Tony Pastor's Opera House, the beje-welled lady of Diamond Jim Brady and the inspiration for the
Gibson Girls. Cumberland Valley originated from the furniture designed and produced by immigrant craftsman along the Cumberland River valley in Tennessee in the early 1800s.
Artists who mirrored American dreams, like Maxfield Parrish and Norman Rockwell, as well as those who dreamed up what now seem quaint sex fantasies, like George Petty, Alberto Vargas, and Tom of Finland, have become as distant as Victorian narrative painting and
Gibson girls, which means we can start to look at them for both pure pleasure and more high-minded studies of art and culture.
The popularity of the uncomfortable S-curve corsets favored by
Gibson Girls of this era, which threw the bust forward and the buttocks back, declined after 1905 with wider use of straight-front corsets.
