Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, July 1922 · page 44 of 67
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang #35 — page 44: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This satirical column mocks emerging 1920s fashion trends imported from Paris. The piece opens with a joke about New York men needing eye doctors because women are displaying their legs more openly—"Male Manhattan is having its lamps trimmed" is slang for men being visually distracted. The column ridicules the latest Paris fashion: straw dresses inspired by Fiji Island and Navajo aesthetics, worn without stockings. The satire lies in treating these expensive haute couture garments as absurd ("Shredded Wheat models") and comparing fashionable mannequins to hula dancers in New York cabarets—equating high fashion with lowbrow entertainment. The closing joke about "nude" stockings emphasizes the risqué nature of the trend: women adopting near-bare legs was scandalous. The piece captures 1920s anxiety about rapidly changing sexual and fashion norms, presented through satirical mockery of both Paris pretension and American women's adoption of these styles.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang 43 Mademoiselle Manhattan BETWEEN the neighboring bathing beaches and advance fashion reports, New York opticians should be busy these days. Male Manhattan is having its lamps trimmed. Paris has just introduced an all-straw gown after the best Fiji Island mode and they say it will be over here in a few weeks. The famous Poiret mannequins have been appearing at the Longchamps race course in these new dresses, which are of straw woven somewhat after the fashion of a Navajo blanket. Before dyeing, the straw is dipped in an oily solution so that the general effect is of a soft and supple sheen, pliant as silk. No stockings are worn with these Shredded Wheat models. Some of the mannequins sported skirts of plain straw much like the hula-hula girls used to wear on the beaches of the New York cabarets. Paris fashion's effort to get away from stockings is slowly taking hold in New York. They haven't gotten away entirely yet but the favorite colors are flesh—pleasantly called nude in the store advertisements—and the sheerest of the sheer. Either way the effect is