Sybil Bruncheon's "Factual Flights of Fashion & Fabulousness... 1954"...
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With the rise of the New Look after the deprivations of World War II, fashion and fashion photography took on an equally "new" power in the newly mega-wealthy United States. Both photographers and their models became icons in both the publishing and entertainment worlds, and their power as arbiters of taste, style, and elegance was irrefutable. The first super-star of the magazine cover was Dovima, formerly Dorothy Virginia Margaret Juba of Queens, NY. Constructing a stage name for herself out of the first two letters of her Christening names, she soon earned the then unheard of sum of $60 an hour modeling, making her the "dollar-a-minute-model" when other girls were lucky to make $20 a day. But, as with all fame and fame-phenomenon, copiers and "knock-offs" began showing up on the runways and in the fashion magazines as well.
It was the 1950s when extreme body image was desired, and possible through a return to corsets, girdles, and push-up bras... and of course through extreme dieting. A girl would do anything to fit into a Dior, a Charles James, Norman Norell, or Balenciaga. And so the 20" waist became the ideal. And the cat's eye make-up to accentuate the severity of the new 50s femininity that left padded shoulders and Rosie the Riveter buried in the forlorn dust of the 1940s. A few models that tried to unseat Dovima included Larva Larue (formerly Bettina Jonk of Kadens Fork, Delaware), Waspina (formerly Carol Ann Kannuski of Wauseon, Ohio), Mantisine (formerly Margie Medfin of Poot Landing, Utah), and Slithera-Sue Summers (formerly Djanna Fong of Carson City, Nevada). Whether on the cover of Vogue (the supreme victory!) or bouncing around here and there inside an issue of Redbook, Collier's, or Good Housekeeping, these models became the feminine ideal of the streamlined decade!... and the scream-queen stars of some of the best science fiction films from Republic Pictures!
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