Long before anyone had a phone in their pocket, there was Camille Clifford, tiny-waisted and pompadoured, staring out from a cigarette card, teaching an entire generation of women how to hold their necks. She was the living embodiment of the Gibson Girl. The American illustrator Charles Dana Gibson’s ideal of confident, curved, high-collared womanhood. Women copied her posture, her hair, her gowns with the same devotion that today’s shoppers apply to a celebrity’s off-duty airport look.
The infrastructure for this early influencer economy was, by the standards of the day, remarkably sophisticated. Cigarette cards put glamorous actresses and dancers into the hands of a mass, cross-class audience alongside football players, businessmen and officers. Evidence that manufacturers already understood the commercial pull of a beautiful, aspirational face attached to an everyday product. Postcards and society magazines did quieter, more respectable work, circulating portraits of aristocrats and refined actresses posed in their most impressive gowns at photographic studios. Suburban studios produced cheaper cabinet-card versions of the same idea for those who couldn’t afford Paris but wanted, however modestly, to participate in the performance.
What I find so striking is how clearly this system separated “aspirational” fame from “respectable” fame; dancers like Loie Fuller or Gaby Deslys were fit for cigarette packets, considered a touch too daring for polite drawing-room magazines, while countesses and society beauties were reserved for postcards. The hierarchy of where a face was allowed to appear told you everything about how desirable, and how dangerous, that face was considered.
Swap cigarette cards for Instagram grids and the mechanism barely changes. We still have a two-tier system of fame, the slightly risqué influencer whose content lives on platforms considered a little louche or controversial, and the more “respectable” celebrity whose partnerships appear in glossier, brand-safe spaces. We still copy posture, hair, and gowns from women we’ve never met, based entirely on a manufactured image circulated for profit. The instinct to model ourselves on a beautifully lit stranger is not a social-media pathology. It’s at least a hundred and twenty years old.
There is one meaningful difference, and it’s worth sitting with. The Edwardian audience knew, on some level, that they were looking at a constructed image, a portrait painted for effect, a stage persona or a retouched photograph. Today’s algorithmic feed blurs that awareness deliberately; a sponsored post is engineered to look like an unguarded, organic, spontaneous moment, which makes the performance far harder to spot and, presumably, far more persuasive.
So perhaps the useful inheritance from the Gibson Girl era isn’t nostalgia for a simpler time, because there was nothing simple about it, but a reminder to reintroduce that awareness deliberately. Every gown we admire on a red carpet, every “effortless” look in a feed, is as constructed as Camille Clifford’s cigarette card. Knowing that doesn’t kill the pleasure of admiring it. It just returns a little agency to the person doing the admiring.