Vanity

Vanity (pronounced van-i-tee)

(1) An excessive pride in one's appearance, qualities, abilities, achievements, etc; character or quality of being vain; conceit.

(2) An instance or display of this quality or feeling.

(3) Something about which one is vain or excessively proud.

(4) Lack of real value; hollowness; worthlessness.

(5) Something worthless, trivial, or pointless.

(6) A small case, usually used for make-up items.

(7) A usually small dressing table used to apply makeup, preen, and coif hair. Normally quite low and similar to a desk, with drawers and one or more mirrors on top; often paired with a bench or stool to sit upon.

(8) A type of bathroom fitting, usually a permanently-fixed storage unit including one or more washbasins.

(9) An alternative name for a portfolio maintained as a showcase for one's own talents, especially as a writer, actor, singer, composer or model.

(10) Any idea, theory or statement entirely without foundation (UK only, now obsolete).

1200-1250: From Middle English vanite, borrowed from Old French vanité (self-conceit; futility; lack of resolve) derived from the Classical Latin vānitās (emptiness, aimlessness; falsity (and when used figuratively "vainglory, foolish pride”), root of which was vānus (empty, void (and when used figuratively "idle, fruitless”).  A more precise equivalent in Latin was probably vanitatem (emptiness, foolish pride).  Root was the primitive Indo-European wano-, the suffixed form of the root eue- (to leave, abandon, give out).  English also absorbed many synonyms and related words: egotism, complacency, vainglory, ostentation, pride, emptiness, sham, unreality, folly, triviality, futility.  Except in religious texts, the old meaning (that which is vain, futile, or worthless) faded from general use, the modern meaning (self-conceited), which endures to this day, is attested from the mid-fourteenth century.  The first reference to furniture was the vanity table, dating from 1936, a use adopted by manufacturers of bathroom fittings in the later post-war period.  The first vanity table seem to have been advertised in 1936.  Vanity is a noun, vanitize is a verb and vanityless is an adjective; the noun plural is vanities.

Art Deco walnut veneer vanity table, circa 1935, with a large, triptych mirror apparatus.

Vanity tables were well suited to the motifs of art deco because the aspect ratio often was similar to the representational public architecture most associated with the style.  This one, believed to have been built in northern Italy is a classic example of art deco, featuring perfect symmetry and a mix of austere straight lines and curves, the proportions elegantly balanced.  Although it's structures like buildings and bridges or the memorable cars of the 1930s that are most often used to illustrate art deco, the niche of the vanity table was in some was more interesting because the size lay between the tiny (such as a vanity case) where the detailing could achieve its effect through intricacy and something on a grand scale like the Chrysler Building (1930), one of New York City's landmark skyscrapers.  

The Old Testament, Savonarola, and the Bonfire of the Vanities

Vanity of vanities, said the preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity. (Ecclesiastes 1:2, King James Version of the Bible (KJV, 1611)).  The word translated as "vanity" appears 37 times in Ecclesiastes, more than in the entirety of the rest of the Old Testament so is clearly a theme of the text.  The meaning of vanity is used here in its original form of something that is transitory and quickly passes away.  In that it’s a literal translation of the Hebrew hebel, best understood in this context as meaning breath of wind, something which, whatever its immediate effects, is soon gone.  Unfortunately for nihilists, emos and other depressives trawling texts for anything confirming the pointlessness of life, biblical scholars agree the phrase is not an assertion that life is meaningless or that our labors in this fallen world are ultimately useless.  Instead, it’s a saying to help people put their lives in the proper perspective.  Ecclesiastes is not saying all our efforts are worthless, just observing that all we do in our three score and ten years upon this earth is but a brief prelude to our eternal existence and much of life escapes our understanding, for we cannot comprehend how everything fits into the grand story of creation.  All very poetic but, perhaps sadly, improbable.  It’s more likely the universe is a violent, doomed, swirl of matter and energy, life is pointless, right and wrong are just variable constructs, everything is meaningless and all any can hope for is a fleeting false consciousness that might make us feel briefly happy.

Nascita di Venere (the Birth of Venus, circa 1485), tempera on canvas, by Sandro Botticelli (1444-1510), Uffizi Gallery, Florence.  The work was painted on a commission from the Medicis; this one was not tossed onto the flames.

What historians came to call the “The Bonfire of the Vanities” was an event in Florence on 7 February, 1497, orchestrated by the fundamentalist Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola (1452–1498).  The Church was at the time riddled with priests who disapproved of just about everything but Savonarola was a true radical who thought direct action more pleasing to God than mere pious words so directed his followers (including many enthusiastic children) to scour Florence for “sinful objects”, including looking glasses (mirrors), musical instruments, books not the Bible or other religious texts, cosmetics, fine clothing, pagan artworks and such.  These objects he ordered gathered and tossed onto a huge, multi-tiered pyre erected in the Piazza della Signoria (the city’s public square), the pile topped by an image of Satan (a nice touch).  Savonarola’s interpretation of scripture demanded people living lives of extreme austerity and, given mankind’s state of constant sin, a constant state of repentance, his aim to purge Florence of secular corruption, his mood much encouraged by the recent expulsion of the Medici family.  Part of the legend of the Bonfire of the Vanities is that Sandro Botticelli was so moved by Savonarola’s apocalyptic sermons he threw some of his own pagan-themed paintings into the fire but there is no contemporary evidence supporting that although, it’s not impossible the artist, sniffing the political wind, decided it wise publicly to sacrifice a few lesser works.  The myth however has always appealed to writers lamenting that barbarians are always with us and in Civilisation (1969) Lord Clark (Sir Kenneth Clark (1903–1983)) wrote the loss of even a few Botticellis seemed “…a heavy price to pay for religious conviction.”

The Florentines Renouncing The Vanities By Order of Savonarola (1890), engraving by an unknown artist.  For fundamentalists, book-burning has never lost its appeal although in places like Florida, Texas, and Tennessee, the process is now virtualized.

Kenneth Clark was a cultural elitist of a kind now perhaps either extinct or rendered silent by a less deferential culture, and, to avoid offending those prone to being offended, some editions of Civilisation subsequently appeared with the title Western Civilisation.  Whether Botticelli really had a “road to Damascus” moment or was just making a “good career move” will never be known but, after the bonfire, a stylistic shift in his art towards the deeply spiritual was obvious but not too much should be read into this: a good artist knows his market.  The Dominican order to which Savonarola belonged had been formed to “combat heresy in the Christian church” and in places in France and Italy where the order had a presence, between the thirteenth & fifteenth centuries there were quite a few such bonfires but what made the one in 1497 most remembered is the historic significance.  Savonarola had for years been preaching about an “end of times” moment, predicting the Apocalypse would come in around 1500 and while in Christendom such messaging was hardly novel, Savonarola was better at it than most and he found audiences more receptive as the corruption in Church and state under the Medicis (Florence’s ruling family of Florence) became more blatantly extractive.  Inflamed by his incendiary words, in 1494 a mob burned down the Medicis' bank and, taking the hint, the family fled the city.  Inspired, Savonarola took power and turned his attention to other un-Godly symbols, notably vanities such as what would now be called “contemporary art” and indulgences such as extravagant clothing and the powders & potions people (including men) used to “beautify themselves”.  Especially offensive were deemed the female Biblical figures in paintings of the time.

Girolamo Savonarola, gemalt von Langenmantel (Girolamo Savonarola Preaching Against Prodigality, 1879), oil on canvas by Ludwig von Langenmantel (1839–1904), Saint Bonaventure University (a Franciscan institution), western New York State.

So, the proto-Talib had his moment of triumph as a particularly practical art critic but among more thoughtful Florentians his reputation suffered because they were appalled their heritage and culture was being threatened just to satisfy one friar’s obsessions; while many were glad to see the end of the Medicis they were not pleased by the loss of the art.  As it was, although Savonarola got to watch the glory of the incineration, his victory over vice proved pyrrhic because he over-reached by dabbling in politics, opposing Alexander VI’s (circa 1431-1503; pope 1492 1503) Holy League against the French; summoned to Rome, Savonarola ignore the order and further defied the Holy See by preaching under a ban, demanding reform of the Church and more bonfires.  The pope in 1497 excommunicated Savonarola and with this most of his popular support evaporated.  On 23 May, 1498, after typically brisk legal proceedings in both civil and ecclesiastical courts had condemned Savonarola and two other Dominican friars who had remained loyal, the trio were hanged and their bodies cremated at the same spot in Piazza della Signoria were the Botticellis had burned; his “end of times” came a couple of years early.  There the matter may have ended but Savonarola's devotees (the Piagnoni (the lamenting ones)) went “underground” and maintained into the next century the cause of religious reform and republicanism, the sect not suppressed until Rome in 1512 engineered the return to power of the Medici.  Seizing the moment, the Medici arranged their own “re-insurance” by securing the throne of Saint Peter for “the Medici Pope” (Leo X (1475–1521; pope 1513-1521)) who may never have uttered the famous phrase” “God has given us the papacy, let us enjoy it” but it certainly summed up the way things were being done “under new management”.  Although damned by many as a barbarian or philistine, some early Protestants (including Martin Luther (1483–1546) himself), regarded Savonarola as a vital precursor to the Protestant Reformation.

Vanity Fair

Published in 1678, John Bunyan’s (1628–1688) The Pilgrim's Progress is an allegory of the Christian’s spiritual journey through the sins and temptations of earthly existence to the salvation of the Kingdom of Heaven; a symbolic vision of an English worthy’s pilgrimage through life.  In the village of Vanity is a perpetual fair, selling all things to satisfy all desires and Vanity Fair represents the sin of man’s attachment to and lust for transient worldly goods, a critique echoed later in secular criticisms of materialism.  Novelist William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–1863), although making no mention of Bunyan or his work when he published Vanity Fair in 1847-1848, could rely on his readers being well acquainted with the symbolism of the earlier allegory.  By the mid-nineteenth century when Thackeray’s portrait of British society was published, the term had become laden too with secular and class-conscious meanings, suggesting the imagery both of self-indulgent playground and the sense of that stratum of society where the only habitué are the idle and undeserving rich.  Memorably, Thackeray explored both although the work obviously is dated and structurally not without error (published originally as a 19-part monthly serial, it does seem the author may have written the latter volumes without having re-read the earlier parts, meaning inconsistencies do exist).

Lindsay Lohan. Vanity Fair Italia, August 2011.

Over the years, on both sides of the Atlantic, a number of periodicals have used the masthead Vanity Fair.  The current one has its roots in Condé Montrose Nast's (1873–1942) purchase in 1913 of (1) a men's fashion journal called Dress and (2) Vanity Fair, a magazine devoted to the performing arts with an emphasis on theatre.  After a brief, unsatisfactory foray as the combined title Dress and Vanity Fair, in 1914 there was a re-launch of Vanity Fair and success was immediate, continuing even until well into the troubled 1930s.  For magazines, the conditions of the Great Depression were curiously different to the vicissitudes of the digital age of the twenty-first century.  Then (as now) revenue from advertising had collapsed by by the Condé Nast in 1936 folded Vanity Fair into his companion title Vogue, circulation had reached an all-time high.  The problem was the cover price of an issue wasn’t enough profitably to cover production and distribution costs; advertising was essential.  In a situation familiar to newspaper publishers in their halcyon days, it wasn’t always financially advantageous to achieve higher sales; unless one's title has the right readers (the prized "A", "B" (and maybe "C1") demographics), the more copies that were sold, the higher the losses.

Condé Nast Publications revived the title with the first issue appearing in February 1983.  Like most print publications, its advertising revenue has declined but, critically in this market, so have newsstand sales.  The subscriber base is said to be stable but Condé Nast doesn’t release data detailing the breakdown and it’s thus unknown how much of this is made up from less lucrative bundled packages.  Newsstand sales of single-issue copies are a vital metric in this market, editors judged by monthly sales, a school of analysis now focused on deconstructing the relationship between the photograph on an issue’s cover and copies sold; editorial content, while not ignored, seems less relevant.  The magazine’s future is thus uncertain as are the options were it not to continue as a distinct, stand-alone entity with a print version.  It’s a different environment from 1936 when it was absorbed into Vogue and different even that things at the turn of the century when Mirabella, a similar publication facing similar problems, closed; the now well-practiced path of ceasing print production and going wholly digital may become attractive if circulation continues to suffer.  While it true Condé Nast already has digital titles that would seem to overlap with Vanity Fair, that’s less of a concern than cannibalization in print where the relationship of production and distribution costs to individual sales is different; both are marginal in gaining additional digital subscriptions.

Vanity Cases 

Enamel vanity case by Gérard Sandoz, Paris, circa 1927 (left) and cigarette case by Cartier, Paris, circa 1925 (right).

It was during the 1920s, the small vanity case's shape and size evolved into what remains the familiar modern form.  Most exquisite were the art-deco creations designed as companion pieces to the cigarette cases newly fashionable with women as the social acceptability of young ladies smoking spread.  As a concept, the vanity case is an ancient accessory, one 3,000-odd years old and made from inlaid cedar containing ointment, face-paint, perfume and a mirror of polished metal, discovered during one of Howard Carter’s (1874–1939) archaeological digs.  Well known in something recognizably modern from the fourteenth century in France and Italy, they became fashionable in England only during the 1700s and then for men, as a small box called a “dressing case”, designed to fit into larger “dressing case”.  The shift to small, portable devices for women came in the late-eighteenth century, just as the handbag (in the modern sense) was becoming a fashion item as well as a functional receptacle.  The essence of the vanity case became its role as a "portable beauty parlour", the inside of the lid fitted with a small mirror while the case contained what was required for "touch-ups" (of eyes, hair, lips, cheeks etc) while on the move or away from one's boudoir.