A CubaNews translation. Edited by
Walter Lippmann.
Women
nowadays no longer hide their physical assets beneath a
complicated abundance of garments. Instead, they’re
ridding themselves of as much clothing as they can to
provocatively boast their eye-catching curves and ample
charms. A daring decision bound to cost them dear: for
all its undeniably quick effectiveness, it may have very
grave consequences in the long run. In fact, it’s
already having social fallout. Attracted though men may
be by this craze for nudity, their fascination is but
fleeting and short-lived. Today’s fashion has no effect on fabric, lace, flounce, bustle, crinoline or leg-of-mutton sleeve –or their vast quantities of resources to conceal or disguise flaws– but on the body itself. You need the daintiness of a sculptor’s hands and a fair set of rules to play the game by, in the open and with no false bottom or camera obscura. Modern-day tailors have to work with the finest art, inventiveness and skill, and make use of girdles and other tricks, the last camouflage resources left to them, only when they need to rectify defects. Nudity has become so fashionable that women now have to count on beauticians and surgeons who can assist their dressmakers. Every big city brims with beauty parlors, small chapels of sorts for the novel religion of the nude where women are offered a chance to be ‘rebuilt’ through the arts of painting, sculpture and architecture. In these places –which we could brand as exterior decoration institutes– a woman can have her hands, fingers, nails, brows, eyelashes, skin and other body parts done by means of massage, makeup, powder, ointment, grease, cream and the like. There were 1,700 women’s beauty parlors in New York last year. Now, according to reports from France’s Conseil Superieur d’Hygienie, Paris has exceeded that number, to the point that the French Minister had to intervene, calling these services a real danger to public health because of the poisonous drugs they use or their no less harmful procedures. In the words of Dr. Bordas, head of laboratory services, «women go to beauty parlors, where they are defenselessly fed to an appalling mechanism designed to rip, crush and torture their flesh by means of ferociously precise devices with such names as the ripper, the crusher, the magic suction pad, the compressor, the roller, the epilator, the thinning machine, and an assortment of hump-leveling, knee-flattening, nape-molding, breast-hardening, belly-stretching and so on and so forth, a strenuous overhaul a woman’s body is not fit to endure. Also, the French chemist mentioned the terrible outcome of a thousand other methods, like the enameling process –to give the body a bluish shade of whiteness– or the bleaching and electric waving of the hair, as well as the erosion, reddening, flaking, swelling, etc., caused by toxins applied to faces and bodies. He finished his report with the following statement: «Should we fail to put a stop to all this mercantilism, which takes advantage of women’s vanity and gullibility, the damage will be irreparable». But the problem is that, not content with the beauty parlors, women have sought assistance from cosmetic surgery. And the doctors have got down to work, becoming beauty creators whose scientific mission has now expanded from merely preventing and curing disease to going one better than Nature too. Thus women bow submissively to the agonies of cosmetic surgery, sometimes with certain, if somewhat ephemeral, success and other times to no avail at all. So it happened recently to a poor French girl who wanted to have her legs surgically refined but ended up instead with a bad case of gangrene, followed by amputation. Thank goodness she sued, for not only did the court order the surgeon to pay 200,000 francs in compensation; it also condemned this medical practice. Some women, on the other hand, achieve exceptional results. Or so it was stated in a Surgery Congress held in Paris last October. Professor Dartigues, a cosmetic surgeon, got a standing ovation from colleagues and onlookers gathered in the conference hall of the French medical school for the cases he presented of women who had undergone surgery, mainly in their breasts. Starting from the premise that there’s no beauty in a woman without breasts and that breasts are beautiful only if they are «shaped in such a way that an equilateral triangle can be traced between the base of the woman’s neck and the tip of her two projections», he went on to describe his surgical procedures, showing several healed patients and their photographs before the operation. According to the newspaper where these facts were published, the sensation of the Congress was a music hall actress Dr. Dartigues had operated on. She was brought «stripped to the waist, her perfect breasts in full view of everyone», and they also showed «a photograph of the same artist before her operation». As Congress Chairman Professor Tixier told the audience after inspecting the woman with the help of a magnifying glass, «other than a very thin red line almost invisible to the naked eye, there are no marks of any surgery». This medical wonder suffers from one drawback only: the name of the surgical procedure, none other than «bilateral mammaplasty with free areolar-mammillary graft». Women’s craze for wearing scant attires has forced tailors into forming a bond with beauty experts and surgeons. The way things are going, we’ll soon see signs in the streets saying «Fashions – Beauty Parlor – Cosmetic surgery». ---ooOoo---
Emilio Roig de Leuchsenring Historian of the City since 1935 until his decease in 1964. |
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