Being rich, pale, and chubby in old-time Los Angeles


In my lifetime, the most desirable shape that women have always wanted to be is skinny. And men want to be lean. Oh yeah, and even though suntans are known to cause skin cancer, most people still consider them more attractive than being pale. Go figure.

So it takes a bit of a jump of imagination when you realize that in old-time Los Angeles, as well as anywhere else that was seen as "fashionable", thin wasn't in, nor was a suntan.

Women who wanted to display their wealth, in addition to wearing expensive jewelry, would take care to keep their complexion as pale as possible (it was a matter of social distinction that society people never had to go out in sunlight, like common laborers did) and while they didn't want to be what we would call "morbidly obese", they certainly didn't want to have a figure that would make people mistake them for a coat rack, or the hired help.

Yes, of course there were the painfully thin and flat-chested flappers of the '20s, but like Twiggy in the 1960s, they were very young, and didn't really show what a full-grown woman looked like. The woman at the top of this post, Mae West, in 1927, is a good example of what society women wanted to look like - full of figure, pale of skin.

By the way, I'm not forgetting the men. Men didn't want to be skinny, and if they didn't work outdoors, they didn't want to have tanned skin. Even things like bluejeans were seen as undesirable, the way that most men won't wear overalls nowadays, because they think it makes them look ridiculous. And men could be rejected for military service if they were underweight. Think of Steve Rogers before he became Captain America.

Times have definitely changed. When I was a kid, in the 1970s, girls played with "Malibu Barbie" who was not only rail-thin (with an unnaturally small waist and large bust), but also deeply tanned. Malibu is where the rich people in Los Angeles live, you know! And nowadays men like me want to have six-pack abs and are embarrassed to wear shorts if their skin is too pale.

I've been house-sitting for many years for a friend of mine who used to live near Malibu, and I would see the wealthy people around there. They would step out of a Ferrari and be thin and tanned. If you time-traveled back to old-time Los Angeles, they would step out of much bigger cars, and be much bigger themselves.
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