Perched daintily on a fireplace mantel, wearing silk pyjamas and satin ballet slippers; demure in a gown with a tightly cinched waist, which is hand-tinted lemon on the reproduction; fur-festooned before a bucolic backdrop, an extravagant Merry Widow hat framing her artful curls. These are some of my favourite images of the Edwardian dancer and stage actress Gabrielle Ray. While my teenage contemporaries were getting sick on snakebite and felt up at Ozric Tentacles gigs of a weekend, I was scouring antique fairs for vintage picture postcards, and for this I respectfully request no judgments be leapt to. She was so very beautiful.
The Royal Mail first sanctioned the posting of single cards, bearing images of famous landmarks, scenic views and celebrities, in 1896. Eight years later the familiar divided-back format, offering half a side for a message and the other for an address, was introduced. The British public embraced this medium with enthusiasm, and soon the sending and collecting of different postcard series had become a hugely popular pastime.
The trend was not without controversy – long before the saucy seaside offerings of Donald McGill appeared, the free circulation of compositions of young ladies in swimwear or even renderings of nude classical statues caused consternation in some quarters. But, vestiges of Victorian moralism notwithstanding, the most coveted amid this explosion of photographic excess were those perfectly posed portraits of theatrical stars of the day.
Gabrielle Ray, along with her Gaiety Girl colleagues Marie Studholme, Lily Elsie and indeed Mabel Russell, who went on to become the country's third female member of parliament, may be long forgotten, yet she retains a legitimate claim to having been one of the first supermodels. Described at the height of her fame by Paris Temps as "the most beautiful woman in the United Kingdom", her image graced more than a thousand picture postcards published throughout the first decade of the last century. She died in a Surrey sanatorium in 1973.
One of Ray's more notable postcards is titled The Swimsuit Affair. In it, she contrives an expression of grave distress, perhaps brought on by the inexpertly painted choppy waters on the screen behind her, or her outfit, which appears to owe more to lederhosen than Lejaby. The pose was considered rather outré at the time, and I was minded of this quaint scenario by the reaction to photographs of another, rather more modern, British supermodel in swimwear last week.
Paparazzi shots of Kate Moss, taken in the unforgiving Mediterranean sun as she holidayed aboard a friend's yacht in St Tropez, revealed a parched visage, replete with – shudder – wrinkles. Doubtless nothing that a glass of water and some factor 50 wouldn't sort out. But this perfectly ordinary manifestation of having lived beyond 25 still seems only acceptable to flaunt in those faux pro-ageing commercials for anti-ageing cosmetics. Cue a slow-news-August debate about the effect on the epidermis of having Too Much Fun.
Moss's Riviera bikini may have been ever so much more itsy-bitsy than Ray's modest seaside attire, but the correspondence across the century between these two women is none so crude. Both have been relentlessly photographed, and their image taken to define the aesthetic of an era. Both have been as much valued for the intrigue surrounding their personal lives as for their professional capacities (Ray enjoyed affairs with a number of European aristocrats before succumbing to depression and alcohol addiction).
And both were, and are, beautiful. The only difference is that Moss exists in a firmament that critiques, isolates and undermines beauty as much as it admires it. The picture postcard equivalents de nos jours – Heat magazine, Closer and their ilk – this week berate Victoria Beckham for drastic dieting, while alerting us to the hip-thickening consequences of Kerry Katona's kebab binges, and picking over the exposed inches of any number of vacationing starlets. Great fashion photography still has a market – consider Mario Testino's rather less sun-scorched shot of Moss on the cover of next month's Vogue – but the images that now have most popular currency are those of celebrities caught off guard, with makeup streaming after a boozy night out, or inadvertently revealing an under-arm sweat stain. The premium is upon our beauties looking as unbeautiful as possible.
Perhaps this appetite is inevitable, given the ubiquity of digital enhancement. The major titles will happily admit to elongating a limb here or shaving a waistline there. (And, while the technology may be new, the impulse is not. Plenty of those picture postcard portraits were taken in flattering soft focus, or later added a rosier hue to cheeks and lips.) Earlier this month, the Snappy Snaps chain announced what anyone with a Facebook account could have told you for free: that increasingly the public themselves are using software to touch up their holiday photos before uploading them.
Perhaps it's a consequence of the nature of modern celebrity that the desire for the uncommonly, consistently beautiful has diminished. Tabloid content is dictated these days by averagely pretty girls and boys talking eloquently about their Botox or buffing-up experiences.
Thus beauty is considered little more than a racket – a consumer imperative imposed on, mainly, women by a misogynist market. (Though note that this month sales of Men's Health magazine outstripped those of FHM for the first time. The male gaze is patently turning in on itself, too.) Anyone can be beautiful with sufficient funds and application. Everyone should be beautiful, "because you're worth it". And, if cellulite cream is not on your shopping list this week, take comfort in the knowledge that even Jerry Hall has dimpled thighs.
But beauty is not only a social construct. It is a gift, not a talent. And it offers, beyond the airbrush and the eye of the beholder, a place to examine our best selves. Maybe that's what those postcard collectors understood, preferring sensory pleasure to schadenfreude. The truly beautiful have the quality of a canvas about them. It creates a distance between the observer and the observed, and in that space we paint our fantasies.
