The Gibson Girl was the personification of a feminine ideal as portrayed in the satirical pen and ink illustrated stories created by illustrator Charles Dana Gibson during a 20-year period spanning the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in the United States.
She was tall, slender yet with ample bosom, hips and bottom in the S-curve torso shape achieved by wearing a swan-bill corset. Her neck was thin and her hair piled high upon her head in the contemporary bouffant, pompadour, and chignon (“waterfall of curls”) fashions. The tall, narrow-waisted ideal feminine figure was portrayed as multi-faceted, at ease and fashionable. Gibson depicted her as an equal and sometimes teasing companion to men.
Many models posed for Gibson Girl-style illustrations, including Gibson’s wife, Irene Langhorne (who may have been the original model, and was a sister of Nancy Astor, Viscountess Astor) and Evelyn Nesbit. The most famous Gibson Girl was probably the Belgian-American stage actress, Camille Clifford, whose high coiffure and long, elegant gowns wrapped around her hourglass figure and tightly corseted wasp waist defined the style.
The Gibson Girl personified beauty, limited independence, personal fulfillment (she was depicted attending college and vying for a good mate, but she was never depicted as part of a suffrage march), and American national prestige. By the outbreak of World War I, changing fashions caused the Gibson Girl to lose favor. Women of the World War I era favored a practical, more masculine suit, compatible with war work, over the elegant dresses, bustle gowns, shirtwaists, and terraced, shorter skirts favored by the Gibson Girl.
