Not from the 30’s but I couldn’t resist this:
“The true dandy was not the most foppishly dressed, the most stylish, the most flash-mannered; he was primarily an artist of talent.” — From a biography of Count D’Orsay, part of Gerald Murphy’s collection of quotes.
If any American dandy in Jazz-Age Paris could look at an automobile part and think “I could wear that,” it was Gerald Murphy.
Photographer Man Ray captured Murphy and his wife, Sara, arrayed for the Comte Étienne de Beaumont’s 1924 Automotive Ball, one of string of fetes that made the nobleman’s name synonymous with up-to-the minute, headline-grabbing party giving.
Here is Sara, bizarre but chic in what looks like a foil dress and oversized driving goggles, accented by the strings of pearls that were her trademark. Gerald, also in goggles, wears tights, gauntlets, and a breastplate into which he has been welded. A fanciful, ziggurat-shaped helmet towers on his head, half metallic wedding cake and half Constructivist chimney.
