What do the women on the cover of Vanity Fair have in common with Mary Pickford?
An excerpt from "Young Hollywood" Is White, Thin:
VF's "Young Hollywood" is much like the golden age of Hollywood: There was a fetishization of the lithe, gorgeous, virginal ingenue, whose virtues and ambitions were pure, and therefore desirable. You either wanted to be her or sleep with her. She was the photographed wearing white, and her "All-American" good looks meant that she was a WASP or a fresh-faced farmgirl. Certainly not black, definitely not fat, and never both. Looking at the March 2010 issue, has anything changed? Even Evgenia Peretz's descriptions of the actresses — "Ivory-soap-girl features," "patrician looks" "dewy, wide-eyed loveliness" — reinforce the idea that a successful actress is a pretty, aristocratic-looking (read: white) actress.
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