Life Magazine peeks behind stylish veils in 1937 –

This year, while the women of the Middle East are still rejoicing in the fairly recently acquired freedom of showing their faces, more women of the west than ever before will cover their features with veils.
No one knows why, but it is the fashion, and demand has gone up tenfold since last year.

Perhaps it’s all part of the general revival of 1900 fashions. Then all well dressed women wore veils, but only in the daytime. Night veils were reputed to be a symbol of “ladies of the evening” For over a decade the veil vogue flourished, reached it’s peak about 1912, then began to wane. The first bobbed heads of the post-war era wore unadorned, small hats, and the veil appeared to wane in fashion, but a girls fondness for adding mystery to her beauty can’t be kept at bay and by the late 1920s, certain stylish Hollywood stars such as Myrna Loy and Mary Duncan were being spotted behind lace.

This present veil craze dates back to the ‘nose veil’ fad of 1929 . Marlene Dietrich positively smouldered behind her veils in the 1932 film Shanghai Express. Thereafter hat veils were very much back in vogue in Hollywood and beyond.

This year of 1937 – they’re down to the waist ! In vogue now is the black-eye veil worn by Harper’s Bazaar model Janet MacLeod – our featured photograph at the start of this post.

Recently pictured outside the Colony Restaurant ( above ) was the ever stylish Mary Pickford, wearing a smart Lilly Dache veil, short in the front and down to the waist at back.

Ruth Ellisse Plummer from Havana sees music wherever she goes – with this shoulder length black veil displaying a musical note motif.

And if you want to know what New York looks like behind a pretty veil, this is the view of the city that Janet MacLeod gets behind her black-eyed veil.

That’s all !

Text©Glamourdaze 2015
Originally published in Life magazine 1937.

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