1930s Women's Fashion Hollywood Jean Harlow

Every Wed evening as a kid, my female parent would force me into an itchy, ugly brownish polyester dress and thick woolen stockings and take me – boot and screaming – to the local community center for my weekly Brownies coming together (for those non in the know, Brownies are a version of Daughter Guides for younger girls).  I'd spend an hr with a bunch of vii-yr-sometime frenemies, sitting around a musty smelling stuffed owl as we recited the group'south "motto, promise and police force". Our nearly of import pledge was to "always put others earlier" ourselves. I remember beingness puzzled past this – why were other people'southward needs so much more of import than mine? Didn't I thing too? Nonetheless, I took the promise to middle. Every bit a daughter, I learned this fabricated life easier. As a woman, I learned this only made life easierfor anybody else.

No wonder as a teenager I always gravitated toward "the feisty ones": the girls in the tight dress; the ones who wore too much brand-up; the girls who gave out plenty of cut-eye but never minced their words.

Girls like Jean Harlow.

Platinum blonde and braless, Harlow's start major motion-picture show office was as Helen, the seemingly heartless vamp who comes between two brothers in Howard Hughes WW1 epicHell's Angels (1930). Although critics scoffed at her functioning, Harlow not only proved herself to exist i of the few stars who could actually expect proficient in early two-strip Technicolor, she as well made movie history with her utterance of the now infamous line "Would y'all be shocked if I put on something more comfy?"A testament to Harlow's on-screen sex entreatment, audiences would call up the line incorrectly equally the much saucier "Would you heed if Islipped into something more comfortable?"

(File:Jean Harlow by George Hurrell 1933.png Wikimedia Commons)

At a fourth dimension when merely the hint of impropriety could "ruin" a girl, Harlow's onscreen personae of a sexually liberated and yes,selfishwoman was an deed of rebellion. As she sashayed across movie screens in low-cut skintight dresses sans underwear, police officers trolled North American beaches to enforce women's bathing-adjust laws: often using a wooden ruler, an officer would measure the altitude of bare flesh between the bottom of a woman'southward bathing costume and her kneecap. Sunbathers who were determined to be showing too much thigh were promptly booted off the beach, arrested or both.  It is therefore no wonder that sexy Hollywood bombshells such equally Harlow and Mae West – brassy, mouthy dames – appealed more to women than they did to men. The studio moguls knew this too, which is why Harlow was frequently cast in gangster movies. Her name to a higher place the film's title guaranteed that women would buy tickets to what was usually considered a male genre.

Although her critics were loath to admit it, Harlow was more than than just a sexy blonde: this beauty had enough of brains. A cocky-professed bookworm with a vivid imagination, Harlow wrote a novel,Today is Tonight, in the mid-1930s. The book was published posthumously in 1965.

"My God," Harlow in one case asked,"must I always clothing a low-cut dress to be of import?"Tired of playing gang molls, Harlow worked diligently at her craft and proved herself to exist a talented comedian in films such asRedheaded Adult female (1932)andDinner at Eight (1933),the latter in which she held her own against the Barrymore brothers, while matching wits with k dame Marie Dressler.

Jean Harlow has a great influence on Wanda Wiggles, the protagonist of my historical fiction novelFilthy Sugar.Wanda lives in a crowded rooming house behind the city'due south market; a world where "expiry is always close but life is stubborn"; where rats live inside the walls and "little vampires" make their homes under mattresses. Similar many impoverished and working-class young women of her time, Wanda finds escape and inspiration in the "flickers", particularly the films of Greta Garbo and Jean Harlow. Modeling herself on Harlow's feisty "redheaded woman", she carves out a new path for herself: one of gamble, sexual fulfillment and autonomy.

With the enforcement of the amended Motion Picture Production Code "to govern the making of motion and talking pictures" in July of 1934, Harlow underwent aTaming of the Shrew-like transformation. As a response to the Code's strict moral guidelines, her skirts became longer, her make-upward lighter and she began wearing a bra (on-screen anyway). Her platinum blonde hair was darkened to a shade dubbed by her studio, MGM, equally "brownette". Once known for playing gun-toting, foul mouthed dangerous dames, Harlow at present portrayed sweet "nice girls" who longed for honey and spousal relationship. The gold digger had grown a heart of aureate. MGM quickly renamed the title of her offset Code-era moving picture fromBorn to Be Kissedto the more innocentThe Girl from Missouri (1934).

Unlike her sex activity-flop contemporaries Mae West and the animated Betty Boop, who also had their on-screen personas squeaky-cleaned upwardly, Harlow was able to weather the Code and continued to pull in box part revenue with hits such every bitWife vs. Secretarial assistant (1936)andLibeled Lady (1936),the latter nominated for the 1937 Academy Honour for Best Picture show. Sadly, the adult female who shaped the fashion and beauty trends of the 1930s would not live to come across the decade's stop: Jean Harlow died of kidney failure on June vii^th, 1937. She was 26 years old.

"I wanna be gratis! I wanna be gay and have fun! Life's brusque,"Harlow exclaims inHell'south Angels. "I wanna alive while I'thou alive!"

Now that's my kind of pledge.

Heather Babcock is an addict of Jean Harlow and pre-Code Hollywood films. She has had brusk fiction published in various literary journals and anthologies including Descant Magazine, Front & Heart Magazine, The Toronto Quarterly, and in the collection GULCH: An Assemblage of Poetry and Prose (2009). Her chapbook, Of Being Underground and Moving Backwards, was published in 2015. She has performed at many reading series including Lizzie Violet's Cabaret Noir, Hot Sauced Words and thePlasticine Poetry series and is a co-founder of The Redhead Revue and I Got You Babe: An Evening of Music and Poetry. Filthy Saccharide is her debut novel. She lives and works in Toronto. www.heatherrosebabcock.tumblr.com

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