NEWSLETTER

Excerpted from The New Book of Lists by Amy Wallace, David Wallechinsky and Irving Wallace.
ILLUSTRATIONS BY LAURA PARK





1915—Lipstick
Coloring for the lips had been sold in pots for centuries, even though it was seldom used by respectable women. It was not until 1915 that it became available in stick form, retailed in a metal cartridge container by American cosmetician Maurice Levy.


1916—Liquid Nail Polish
No sooner had women started applying lipstick than they were shocking their menfolk by varnishing their nails. The first nail polish was Cutex, introduced by Northam Warren.


1921—Chanel No. 5
Ernst Beaux created the first “designer perfume” for legendary Paris couturier Coco Chanel while they were staying in Biarritz. And what about Chanel nos. 1-4? They never existed. The “5” was coined because the perfume was launched in 1921 on the fifth day of the fifth month.


1923—Varnished Toenails
Pola Negri, eccentric Polish-born superstar of the Hollywood silents, pioneered the practice of polishing toenails. She later recalled that the first time she went out in public wearing sandals and scarlet toenails, a woman glanced at her feet and then shrieked, “She’s bleeding!”


1926—Bare Legs
Although Pola Negri had started to go bare-legged at the same time that she began painting her toenails, it was some years before the practice caught on among the other denizens of Hollywood. Joan Crawford claimed to have pioneered the fashion for bare legs with evening wear, abandoning her stockings when hemlines reached the knee in 1926 and only putting them on again when long frocks came back into fashion in 1930. What was acceptable in private, however, took some daring in public. In 1927 blond starlet Rita Carewe began going stockingless for comfort in the hot Los Angeles summer, but in order to preserve the proprieties she polished her tanned legs to look as if they were clad in silk. At the Wimbledon championships that same year, teenage South African tennis star “Billie” Tapscott was booed by the crowd for appearing on court with her legs bare.


1928—Women’s Pants for Evening Wear
Women had started wearing colorful “beach pajamas” on the French Riviera in 1926, but they were definitely only for the plage. Two years later, British actress Hermione Baddeley defied convention when she wore pants for an evening reception to celebrate her wedding to the aristocrat the Honorable David Tennant.


1930—Women’s Pants for Day Wear
The movies have always exerted a strong influence on fashion, and never more so than when Marlene Dietrich appeared in slacks in Josef von Sternberg’s classic picture Morocco. The women of America took to pants with an eagerness that might have been more restrained had they understood von Sternberg’s intention to signal the lesbian tendency of the character portrayed by the alluring Dietrich.


1935—Men’s Briefs
Introduced by the Cooper Underwear Company of Kenosha, Wisconsin, the first briefs with an open seam went on sale at Marshall Field’s in Chicago in January. When they were launched in Britain in 1938, the manufacturers advised left-handers to wear them inside out.


1935—Women’s Jeans
No one knows for sure when women started to wear jeans, though one thing is sure—they never wore them to ride the range as depicted in movies about the old West. It probably began in the new West with the advent of dude ranches. The May 15, 1935, issue of Vogue depicts two chic and sophisticated Manhattanites improbably dressed as cowgirls. Part of the costume, Vogue explained, was “simple-but-severe blue jeans or Levis, turned up at the bottom once, laundered before wearing (to eliminate stiffness), cut straight and tight fitting, worn low on the hips, in the manner of your favorite dude wrangler.” By the following year, jeans for women had headed east. It was reported that the free spirits of Mrs. Hallie Flanagan’s drama course at top women’s school Vassar had abandoned their skirts in favor of blue jeans.


1936—Loafers
The penny loafer was designed by the G.H. Bass Company of Wilton, Maine, as an adaptation of the Norwegian slipper moccasins that had become fashionable on the French Riviera the previous year. Bass called them Weejuns, as a contraction of “Norwegian.” They went on sale in men’s fittings only at Rogers Peet of New York at $12 a pair, with women’s fittings following the next year. The origin of the practice among preppies of inserting a penny into the saddle of their loafers is, according to Bass, completely unknown.


1939—Nylon Stockings
The first women to wear nylon stockings were employees of the DuPont nylon yarn plant in Wilmington, Delaware, in February 1939. They were available to other Wilmington ladies the following month, when they went on sale at a few selected stores in the city. There was the odd problem with these experimental batches. They had a tendency to turn yellow after a while. And they generated so much static electricity that in dry weather, ladies might find that preparations for bed were accompanied by the crackle of sparks.


1942—T-Shirts
The US Navy called it a T-Type when they issued specifications for a knitted cotton shirt with a round neck and short sleeves set at right angles to the front and back panels. While the navy saw its chief virtue as “greater sweat absorption under the arms,” sailors were more impressed with the striking effect it had on girls. After the war, it formed part of another kind of uniform, as teenagers of both sexes sported t-shirts with blue jeans and sneakers—the first unisex leisure-wear costume.


1946—Bikini
Micheline Bernardini entered fashion history—and subsequently received 50,000 fan letters—when she modeled the first bikini at a Paris fashion show in July 1946. The creation of automotive engineer and swimsuit designer Louis Réard, the skimpy two-piece was made up of a fabric printed with newspaper text. And the name? On July 1, the Americans had detonated an atomic bomb at Bikini Atoll in the South Pacific. The suit was dubbed the bikini because of its explosive impact on the fashion world.


1949—Sneakers
The German sportswear manufacturer Addas (later Adidas) introduced their “three-strip” running shoe, designed by Adolf Dassler. All the sneakers in the world trace their descent from this prototype.


1959—Pantyhose
Pantyhose were launched as Panti-Legs by Glen Raven Mills of Glen Raven, North Carolina, and worn by ballet dancers and beatnik girls. Glen Raven’s chief executive, Allen Gant, had been asked to develop them by his pregnant wife because she found stockings with a constrictive garter belt too uncomfortable. The original Panti-Legs had a seam running up the calf to make them indistinguishable from stockings. This was changed at the behest of veteran fan dancer Sally Rand, vaudeville star of the 1920s and 1930s, who was still performing as the 1960s dawned. She reckoned Panti-Legs would be ideal for wearing on drafty stages, but as she was supposed to be naked behind her fans, the seams were a giveaway. When the new seamless Panti-Legs were launched in 1961, Ms. Rand was able to perform before goggle-eyed audiences who remained wholly unaware of her innocent deception.


1960—Lycra
A synthetic polyurethane fiber with the elastic properties of rubber was developed by DuPont and named Lycra. In December 1960 the Warner Lingerie Company introduced the Little Godiva step-in girdle, the first garment made of Lycra.


1961—Afro Hairstyle
Bronx teenager Barbara Terry had a date but found that she had no time to hot-press and curl her hair. Fortunately, her father was proprietor of a hairdressing salon, Nelson’s Tonsorial Parlor. With his help, Barbara was on time to meet her beau, with her hair frizzed out in a style that other young black women—and eventually men—emulated.


1964—Miniskirt
In March 1964, British Vogue announced the sensation of the 1960s. The hemline had reached the knee in 1926, during the era of the flappers, but did not rise above it in the fashion world until Paris couturier André Courrèges took it four inches above the knee in 1964. British designer Mary Quant took it even higher than that three years later.


1979—Air-Cushioned Sneakers
Aerospace engineer Frank Rudy developed the concept of the Nike Tailwind after studying the pressurized gasbags that enabled lunar modules to make safe landings.


1989—Inflatable Sneakers
The Reebok Pump was a basketball shoe designed to give the wearer a customized fit when it is inflated by pressing a small compressor, shaped like a basketball, in the tongue.


1993—Long-Lasting Perfume
Shiseido Eau de Cologne was launched in Japan in May 1993. It contained hydroxy-propyl-cyclodexrin to inhibit evaporation, and the scent remained clear and strong for eight or nine hours. A conventional eau de cologne loses its fragrance after only one or two hours.


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