Life, 1909-03-11 · page 7 of 36
Life — March 11, 1909 — page 7: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This is a "Life" magazine fashion page titled "LIFE FASHION NUMBER." The main illustration depicts an elegantly dressed woman in fashionable early 1900s attire—a fitted black coat dress with a dramatic train and an elaborate feathered hat. The satire appears in the accompanying dialogue sections. "Important Information" presents a satirical exchange where a woman has "locked the serpent to one side" and boasts of ridding herself of "hips." "Not for Her!" features a fairy offering youth-restoration magic, which the woman refuses, claiming her current fashionable silhouette already achieves the desired youthful appearance through clothing and corsetry. The joke targets women's fashion obsession and the extreme corseting that created unnaturally thin silhouettes, mocking how fashion temporarily "solved" aging concerns without actual bodily change.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
FASHION NUMBER Important Information ELVE beckoned the serpent to one side. “Tell me,” she implored, “how you got rid of your hips 2” For while the Directoire had not come in as yet, the way things were going it was ua- doubtedly destined to do so. Not for Her! “YY ITH one wave of my wand,” says the fairy, “I can make you grow young * Excuse me,” replies the woman, " if I de- cline your kind offer. If you can bring youth to me at my present age, all right; but I posi- tively refuse to travel back through pyrogra- phy, the first stages of bridge, the habit back, the straight front, balloon sleeves and all the rest of the fads I can remember.” comicbooks.com