My great-great grandmother Ella put a lot of store in appearances, which is not unusual for my family nor, I’m sure, for many others.  As an immigrant who aspired to higher strata of society, Ella knew that appearances were important when it came to getting where she wanted to go, and she was always (seemingly) scrupulous about keeping them up.  I have a small collection of photographs documenting her as a fashionable and well-dressed lady throughout her life.  Many of these photographs are single portraits of a young Ella pictured by herself, like the one above.  Taken before her marriage, I suspect that some of these pictures were meant to be sent back home to Hungary, to her father, sister and brother who still lived there.  This image, taken by a relatively prominent Chicago photographer, is one of my favorites and one of the most fashionable portraits out of all of Ella’s fashionable portraits.

Ella was a smart lady, though, and she knew it took more than just clothes to further oneself.  Indeed, she committed her children to a jam-packed extracurricular schedule of music lessons, dancing lessons, language lessons, speech lessons, knowing that these skills would also help them to present themselves as cultured people.  It is still somewhat telling, though, that these are the sorts of lessons she made sure her children attended (well, at least her daughter Rona - I’m not sure about her son Stanley) instead of pushing them to, say, go to college. 

I don’t really think that Ella’s aspirations are the entire reason behind her beautiful clothes, though they are certainly a large part of it.  Growing up not exactly poor as the daughter of a tavern keeper in a small town in Hungary, it would stand to reason that fine clothes and rich fabrics like these might be the stuff of dreams for a girl.  And, once in America, with money of her own in a big city, dressing up like a lady in a magazine would seem like a dream fulfilled.  So despite the frustration I have with the world of appearances that Ella believed in, I can hardly fault her for trying to live out a dream and doing it in such good taste.

Ella Holzmann Brown (1882-1971)