Posts Tagged ‘The Wonderful Wizard of Oz’
“It is difficult to predict, especially the future”*…
An amusing attempt to take the long view…
W. Cade Gall’s delightful “Future Dictates of Fashion” — published in the June 1893 issue of The Strand magazine — is built on the premise that a book from a hundred years in the future (published in 1993) called The Past Dictates of Fashion has been inexplicably found in a library. The piece proceeds to divulge this mysterious book’s contents — namely, a look back at the last century of fashion, which, of course, for the reader in 1893, would be looking forward across the next hundred years. In this imagined future, fashion has become a much respected science (studied in University from the 1950s onwards) and is seen to be “governed by immutable laws”.
The designs themselves have a somewhat unaccountable leaning toward the medieval, or as John Ptak astutely notes, “a weird alien/Buck Rogers/Dr. Seuss/Wizard of Oz quality”. If indeed this was a genuine attempt by the author Gall to imagine what the future of fashion might look like, it’s fascinating to see how far off the mark he was (excluding perhaps the 60s and 70s), proving yet again how difficult it is to predict future aesthetics. It is also fascinating to see how little Gall imagines clothes changing across the decades (e.g. 1970 doesn’t seem so different to 1920) and to see which aspects of his present he was unable to see beyond (e.g. the long length of women’s skirts and the seemingly ubiquitous frill). As is often the case when we come into contact with historic attempts to predict a future which for us is now past, it is as if glimpsing into another possible world, a parallel universe that could have been (or which, perhaps, did indeed play out “somewhere”)…
More at: “Sartorial Foresight: Future Dictates of Fashion (1893)” in @PublicDomainRev.
Browse the original on the Internet Archive.
* Niels Bohr (after a Danish proverb)
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As we ponder the problem of prognostication, we might recall that it was on this date in 1934 that producer Samuel Goldwyn bought the film rights to L. Frank Baum’s book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which had been a hit since its publication in 1900 but had until then been considered both inappropriate (as it was a “children’s book”) and too hard to film. Goldwyn was banking on the drawing power of his child star Shirley Temple, the original choice for Dorothy; but (as everyone knows) the role went to Judy Garland who won a special “Best Juvenile Performer” Oscar and made the award-winning song, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” a huge hit.
The film was only a modest box-office success on release… but has of course become a beloved classic.
“Memory is more indelible than ink”*…
At least for some of us it is– for instance, Solomon Shereshevsky, a Soviet journalist and mnemonist, widely-regarded as the “man with the greatest memory ever” (and the subject of neuropsychologist Alexander Luria‘s 1968 case study The Mind of a Mnemonist). From Wikipedia…
He met Luria after an anecdotal event in which he was scolded for not taking any notes while attending a work meeting in the mid-1920s. To the astonishment of everyone there (and to his own astonishment in realizing that others could apparently not do so), he could recall the speech word for word. Throughout his life, Shereshevsky was tasked with memorizing complex mathematical formulas, huge matrices, and even poems in foreign languages that he had never spoken before, all of which he would memorize with meticulous accuracy in a matter of minutes.
On the basis of his studies, Luria diagnosed in Shereshevsky an extremely strong version of synaesthesia, fivefold synaesthesia, in which the stimulation of one of his senses produced a reaction in every other. For example, if Shereshevsky heard a musical tone played he would immediately see a colour, touch would trigger a taste sensation, and so on for each of the senses…
His memory was so powerful that he could still recall decades-old events and experiences in perfect minute detail. After he discovered his own abilities, he performed as a mnemonist; but this created confusion in his mind. He went as far as writing things down on paper and burning it, so that he could see the words in cinders, in a desperate attempt to forget them. Some later mnemonists have speculated that this could have been a mentalist’s technique for writing things down to later commit to long-term memory…
Unforgettable: “Solomon Shereshevsky,” from @Wikipedia.
* Anita Loos
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As we muse on memory, we might recall that it was on this date in 1900 that The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was published. Written by L. Frank Baum and illustrated by W. W. Denslow, it was an immediate hit, spawning a flow of further editions (soon known simply as The Wizard of Oz), stage adaptations, and of course the classic 1939 live-action film. It had sold three million copies by the time it entered the public domain in 1956.
Crèche or credit card?…
Readers may recall that L. Frank Baum was famous before he wrote The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz— he was a celebrity in the then-emerging world of consumer marketing, one of the first great window dressers.
Baum’s art flourished as retailing grew, finding its apotheosis on the Christmas displays that graced department stores around America. Now, thanks to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, readers can take a stroll past the Holiday windows and Christmas store displays of yore…
Giant Christmas candle carousels, Marshall Field & Company, main aisle, Chicago, about 1956
Take the (online version of the) trip at “Holidays on Display” (and see William Bird’s book of the same title).
As we channel Ralphie’s Red Ryder lust, we might raise a cup of testimony tea to Emily Dickinson, who was better known during her life as a gardener and botanist than as a poet; only 7 of her 1775 poems were published in her lifetime– which began on this date in 1830.
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