Life, 1925-04-23 · page 7 of 37
Life — April 23, 1925 — page 7: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This satirical cartoon mocks the perceived fashion competition between husbands and wives, particularly regarding tailors versus dressmakers. The joke's premise: if men's tailors followed women's dressmakers' lead in design trends, men would adopt equally extreme and ridiculous fashions. The sequential panels show increasingly absurd male clothing—oversized silhouettes, exaggerated proportions, and impractical styles mirroring 1920s women's fashion extremes. The final panel asks "Shall We Ape the Ladies?"—directly questioning whether men should blindly imitate women's fashion choices. The satire targets both fashion's rapid changes and gender anxieties about masculine identity during the flapper era, when women's fashions had become noticeably more daring and less restrictive than traditional styles.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
Ir A MAN'S TAILOR TRIED TO FoLLow SuiT To HIS WIFE'S ORESSMAKER'S LEAD SHALL WE APE THE LADIES? Lirt’s Encyclopedia GoLF (Cf. Scot. Gour or Goor, a blow, a nut)—A game which consists in striking a small, resilient ball with clubs having heads into a series of holes situated at varying distances with artificial obstacles interposed. The object is to put the ball into each hole in as few strokes as pos- sible. The blows counted are often reduced to a minimum by artful players through some such artifice as kicking the ball out of traps, or otherwise improving a bad lie, forget- ting strokes taken but not seen by other players, and bribing the caddy to do the counting for the golfer. Addiction to golf is considered adequate grounds for divorce in some of the more advanced States. Stuart Little, comicbooks.com