(Click on image to enlarge)
Image courtesy of Eldon Harms.
Eva Thompson is at left, sitting on the car; her mother, Nancy, is at the far right. The other two are unidentified.
There is no date on this photo. In my notes, I wrote: "The car is a Chevy like Lester Dye's"; Eldon Harms must have told me that. But the Ainsworth vintage-car expert tells me that — based on what little he can see of it — he thinks the car might be a 1926 or '27 Dodge. The fashions are consistent with that era.
Eva and Nancy are coatless and hatless, which suggests that they are at home. But the location is unidentified. Behind Nancy is a substantial two-story brick building; that, plus the rolling landscape in the background, tells me that we're not at the old James Chester place east of Ainsworth, where the Thompsons once lived. If I had time, I'd go driving around to look at the land surrounding their other known homes, to see if any combination of home and landscape might resemble this photo. But, of course, I don't have time.
Eva seems to be wearing her "good" clothes. Her dress shines like silk, but I wonder if it could be rayon? My mother, who reached young womanhood in the late 1930s, told me that in her day rayon was looked down upon as "poor man's silk" and you had to be pretty hard up to resort to wearing it. I really don't know how prosperous the Thompson family was. In the same vein, I don't know if Eva's long necklace is made up of real pearls.
At about knee level, her costume gets so complicated: the dress seems to be lined, or maybe that's a slip; and then — bloomers? And stockings held up with pretty lace-edged garters, which she doesn't care if the camera memorializes.
Which leads me to wonder who was operating the camera.
3 comments:
As to the "fashion" question it can be looked at 2 ways. The height of fashion for young women ("flapper" era) was an "androgynous" look, with a short (relative) skirt, a string of pearls hanging way low, a cloche hat, bobbed hair, stockings rolled down to the knees, and believe it or not, 4-buckle galoshes, worn unbuckled,(!) of the type kids slogged to school in the '60s with! The second way to look at this is by studying the photo. Those "stockings" may very well be "mud spats" since they seem to pass under her shoes to a degree. This was a necessary accessory mostly for men due to muddy roads and such, but it's not a stretch to think that it may in her case be a fashion statement!! It would go along with the "crossover" clothing look of the times.
You seem to be looking at Eva abstractly, as a representative of 1920s fashion. She is; but she is also an individual: a young woman from an Indiana farming family, who otherwise is dressed on the rural-Indiana side of 1920s fashion, whose dress is wrinkled, and who, at this moment, is hatless and coatless. The principle of parsimony would suggest that her stockings have an annoying tendency to droop, rather than that she is wearing "mud spats" either for fashion or for utility.
That could be too, of course! The best chance for the stocking though would be spats-leggings, since it is rural, and mud on the farm or the road is good chance!! Those "devices" had a strap that went under the shoes ahead of the heel. and a close look at the photo seems to bear this out.
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