It’s been a long time since I’ve done a Miscellany.* Here’s an all-women’s-magazine edition, full of summer pleasures.
Get your wool bathing dresses here!**
Harper’s Bazar, June 1918
With stockings, of course!
Harper’s Bazar, August 1918
What is junket, I wondered. Answer: rennet. What is rennet, I wondered. Answer: an enzyme made by slicing up the stomach linings of young calves.
Sometimes it’s better just to wonder.
Woman’s Home Companion, August 1918
These outfits are adorable and all, but have the designers ever MET a boy?
Harper’s Bazar, August 1918
How many lively out-o’-door appetites can YOU find in this picture?
Woman’s Home Companion, August 1918
Why am I not sipping a new-day drink in a crisp white frock?
Ladies Home Journal, June 1918
Ladies Home Journal, July 1918
Enjoy the last few weeks of summer, everyone!
*Which, now that my schedule has changed from Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday to whenever I feel like it, is now just Miscellany instead of Thursday Miscellany.
**Okay, some are silk.
My Life 100 Years Ago 
You just sent me running in horror to Amazon to find out if the junket my mother used to make (basically a thin, delicious custard) contained the stomach linings of young calves. Nope, just good old American chemicals. Phew.
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Yikes! Nothing like considering the alternatives to make you appreciate consuming chemicals.
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Oh, I do love the all-women’s magazine artwork, not to mention the range of activities referred to in these tributes to wealthy living. Summer pleasures are pretty much limited to gatherings at the beach. Here’s your chance to buy a wool bathing dress — styles for the whole family, delicately drawn — including a special one with a coordinating coat and hat! The ad for Onyx Hosiery (not necessarily to wear with a bathing dress) has solved the mystery of my ancestors’ snapshots of themselves wearing black stockings. Why black? I always wondered. Now I know about Onyx Hosiery for an elegant, slimming look.
I love your sarcastic asides to ads like the one that accompanies the busy, multi-figure image for Growing Boys; the “togs” are preppy and probably uncomfortable even as they suggest sailor suits, safari-wear, and one or two urbane outfits for the city. As for junket, that rings a bell, but it morphs in my memory into a kind of Jell-o, which nobody in my family got very excited about, thank goodness. As a former copywriter, though, I most admired the phrase “for lively out-o’-door appetites,” illustrated with a small group of friends seated at an outdoor table and served by a butler and maid. Swift’s Premium Ham thus makes another appearance after being lauded as a simple treat for tardy dinner guests a few posts ago. (That’s one successful company.)
With that phrase, you really capture the tone of gracious living that is missing today, having been replaced by “All you can eat.” Even the magazine titles show us who was doing the reading: Women’s Home Companion says it all.
I’m still wondering what a new-day drink is, though, so I’d better come back to the 21st century and search that new-fangled, clumsily named Google.
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I love your professional-copywriter take on 1918 ads! I’m having the NYU Paris DC contingent over next week, and I’m thinking of making New-Day drinks, if I can blow up the recipes to legible size. They look so refreshing! If I do, they’ll be In plastic cups, not glasses with gold rims. I wish you could join us!
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I wish I could join you, too! Then I’d know definitively what New-Day drinks are! I would even bring my own glassware, consisting of a single Depression-era tumbler with a pinkish cast, which I picked up at a flea market eons ago. Every once in a while I get into the mood for acquiring antiques; luckily it’s more of a “phase” than a hobby, or else my small kitchen would be bulging with mismatched, probably scratched amenities that would get on my nerves eventually. Glad you liked the copywriter references. Phrasing was all. Fond regards to my fellow MFAers/New-Day drinkers!.
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