"Pompadours had long gone out of fashion, but they had been in when Valancy first put her hair up"
Pompadours were an Edwardian style that lingered into the 1910s but had entirely gone out of fashion by the early 1920s. Here's a likely sort of small pompadour from the Dover reprint of the 1915 Gimbel's catalog.
I liked these modest pompadours for Valancy because they don't require much in the way of pads, hairpieces, or styling time. If The Blue Castle is set some time between 1921 and 1925, then 29-year-old Valancy would have started putting her hair up between 1908 and 1912, when pompadours were still "in."
Valancy had hankered to do her hair pulled low on her forehead, with puffs above the ears, as Olive was wearing hers.
Olive likely isn't wearing the bob that's now popularly associated with the 1920s, as only about 25% of fashionable big-city women had adopted the bob by 1925. There's another popular style that gave the front fluffiness of a bob, with a bun hidden in back. These are from the Dover Everyday Fashions of the Twenties book.
These young women have hair pulled low on their foreheads, puffs over their ears, and hints of a bun in back to take up the excess length. Olive is fashionable, but she's not taking it to the point of being daring.
Valancy took off and hung up in the closet her nightdress of coarse, unbleached cotton, with high neck and long, tight sleeves. She put on undergarments of a similar nature, a dress of brown gingham, thick, black stockings and rubber-heeled boots.
It is highly likely that Valancy's family is keeping her in dresses that are out of style, for their own notions of economy, practicality, and virtue. While the pure brown-gingham ugliness of that dress is clear regardless of context, it probably resembles the third dress from the left (also from the 1915 Gimbel's catalog).
That dress probably seems cuter to us today than it would to someone in roughly 1922. By the early 1920s, that natural waist and flared skirt was severely out of style. Fashionable Olive would have dressed more like the young women at far right in each of these catalog images. Shorter sleeves, lower waists, lighter fabric with more flow, straighter silhouette.
If this were a Louisa May Alcott story, we'd be trudging toward Valancy's learning to accept brown gingham as serviceable and appropriate. But Lucy Maud Montgomery famously let Anne of Green Gables have her puffed sleeves, so I'm hoping Valancy will get something more like these dresses.
chapter two
