Tillie the Toiler Fashion Parade!

Though most people have never heard of her, Tillie the Toiler must have been the best-dressed comic strip character of all time. Created in the 1920s by Ray Westover, the strip lasted 30 years and traced Tillie's evolution from a brainless flapper to a sophisticated Lois-Lane-type working woman. But what was really unusual about Tillie was the way she dressed - or rather, WAS dressed. Quite literally, her followers designed her clothes for her. Fans were encouraged to send in sketches for the artists to develop into haute couture. If you look carefully at these images, you will see the names and addresses of the designers included with most of the ensembles. What a thrill it must have been to see your creation modelled on your favorite paper doll!

"See you in the funny papers": the legend of Tillie the Toiler

It took me a while to figure out just what was going on here. They're paper dolls from old newspapers, obviously, but they look a little different. I know who Tillie the Toiler is (who doesn't?) - a famous newspaper comic-strip office girl who basically gets chased around her desk a lot. This strip was so popular that it ran from the 1920s flapper era all the way into the late '50s. There was even a movie made  from it, starring Marion Davies (more about her later). 

One of the most popular offshoots of Tillie's exploits was the Fashion Parade. Tillie had more glamorous clothes  than any working girl I've ever heard of. But that's because they were designed by her fans! The newspapers that carried Tillie had an ongoing contest in which readers could submit their dress designs to Tillie's creator, Russ Westover, and someone in the art department would try to make them look like something (not to say that SOME of the kids didn't have talent). It was a nice idea, it promoted reader participation, and made everyone  feel as if they were somehow part of Tillie's magical, exciting, well-clothed life.

It interests me that, along with their names, the page always included complete addresses for the guest designers. Genealogists have used newspapers for years to sift out information about ancestors, and to discover a published document that has not only the name but the address of a long-lost relative (not to mention, if you were lucky, a date) would be a tremendous find. Who knows how many people Tillie helped to find a lost link in an ancestral chain. If a fictitious character can be of this much help to people long after she's gone, then what is wrong with all the rest of us?

(Don't be surprised when this gif/slideshow starts to go REALLY fast!)

About Marion Davies. A very talented B-movie actress mainly known for being the mistress of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, the titan who was the subject of Orson Welles' biting satire Citizen Kane. Davies and Hearst rolled around in diamond-encrusted splendor, but there was a peculiarity in one of the opulent rooms: a statue of the virgin Mary set in a prominent place. Hardly appropriate for a couple so flagrantly living in sin.

This prompted some wag - some say Dorothy Parker, but it's not quite good enough for that - to write:

Upon my honor
I saw a Madonna
Standing in a niche
Over the door
Of the glamorous whore
Of a prominent son of a bitch.

BIG DISCOVERY! It's Sunday afternoon, I just had a recipe not turn out and I am kind of pissed off because I'll have to throw it all out.  But I was happy to uncover a mystery about Tillie. I dug a little deeper into the movie, and discovered it wasn't Marion Davies who played her at all. It was someone named Kay Harris. Wait a minute! There couldn't be two Tillies. One was obscure enough. 

I had to figure this out. It couldn't be a very early TV show, could it? The kind I love, love, love, the kind from 1948 which seems to be the first year a cathode ray quivered in the air in the living rooms of America?  But no. She wasn't on TV at all, but in a movie from 1941, a B-movie obviously, the kind Turner Classics loves to show in the middle of the night (usually in an endless series no one knows or cares about). A bit more checking revealed that the first version with Marion Davies was a silent made in 1927. Though YouTube usually has fragments of almost everything, it didn't have Tillie the Toiler, not in either incarnation.

In fact, it looks like she hardly existed at all. Now all we have are these beautiful paper dolls from the funny papers, and a strange fragment of genealogy with mysteries unlocked, but only partially solved. 

POSTSCRIPT. Do I detect the odor of frying Spam? Not any more! For a while at least, I will have to restrict my comments.

Working girl: the life of Tillie the Toiler

I will admit that the name Tillie the Toiler caught my attention. As usual, I was looking for something else: vintage comic book paper dolls, the kind with so much detail that cutting out the dresses with those fiendish little tabs would be well-nigh impossible.

And in looking for paper dolls, I found. . . 

Tillie the Toiler
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Tillie the Toiler is a newspaper comic strip created by cartoonist Russ Westover who initially worked on his concept of a flapper character in a strip he titled Rose of the Office. With a title change, it sold to King Features Syndicate which carried the strip from 1921 to 1959.
Characters and story[edit]

Stylish working girl Tillie was employed as a stenographer, secretary and part-time model. An attractive brunette, she had no problem finding men to escort her around town. Comics historian Don Markstein described the story situations:Tillie (last name Jones) toiled for a fashionable women's wear company run by clothing mogul J. Simpkins. Or usually did, anyway—she'd occasionally quit or be fired, as the plotline, which ran at breakneck pace and didn't always make perfect sense, required. 

During World War II, in fact, she even joined the U.S. Army. But she always came back to Simpkins.  Whatever she did and wherever she went, however, she was impeccably dressed in the very latest styles. This helped her in the pursuit of charming and often wealthy young men, who came and went at an alarming rate, providing grist for the story mill.

The comic strip inspired two films of the same name: Tillie the Toiler (1927), a silent film with Marion Davies in the title role, and Tillie the Toiler (1941), starring Kay Harris

Who knew? I didn't, and found her by accident. Perhaps, like the immortal Hilda, Tillie the Toiler will soon make a well-deserved comeback. She seems surprisingly contemporary. Most "girls" of the era would envy Tillie her wardrobe, if not her exciting love life. She seems to me like the quintessential flapper, financially independent (if poorly paid), with a ton of male attention. 

A typical Sunday "funny papers" page, extra-special 'cuz it's in colour. I remember those days.  This entry seems to be about the characters' grief over the passing of the jitterbug dance craze. But it's soon to be surpassed by "super-goofy dancing", which involves throwing women up in the air or over your shoulder.

This is what you'd get during the week. I notice a certain difference between Tillie (and the other girls in the office) and the rest of the characters, particularly in the men, who are somewhat primitive in appearance. A bit of Dagwood going on here. Tillie, however, is always immaculate in her dress and coiffure. The Jitterbug is still on people's minds, as in the song, "Put on your flash bang togs/You're gonna slap your dogs/At the Jitterbug Jamboree". 

Though Tillie is a "working girl" in the old-fashioned sense, being a model on the side inclined her working life towards the exotic, if not the suggestive. This was the '20s, after all, and the Hays code (which may or may not have included the funny papers) had not yet kicked in. Betty Boop still wore skirts that barely covered the essentials, whereas in wartime, they were somewhat below the knee. As for that wardrobe. . . do you remember Carrie Bradshaw of Sex and the City? How on earth could she afford all those Manolo Blahniks from writing one skimpy column a week about the sexual goings-on in a large American city?

Honestly, some of these are plain gorgeous! My only question now is: did Tillie, like Boop, ever become an animated character? I can't find any evidence of it, nor can I find any clips from her two eponymous (I've been waiting all my life to use that word) movies. Turner Classics may some day dredge one of them up - their selections can be pretty dreadful, stretching the definition of the word "classics". 

So is Tillie the Toiler a thinner version of Hilda? I don't think so. Hilda was carefree and unsophisticated, and while she was always on the phone, reading letters and running around in skimpy clothing, implying there were definitely boy friends in her life, you got the idea she wasn't being chased around the desk like Tillie. And her wardrobe (bikinis made of autumn leaves, daisies or flour sacks) was too simple for tabs.