CULT2

1926: “This girl has all of [the] trends and she’s not loath to wear them at once: bell earrings, a dog collar worn as a necklace, a large beauty spot on her cheek, an ivory cigarette holder, a design to cover the vaccination mark on her arm, heavy bracelets, an anklet, a photo of a boyfriend on her stocking, an anklet watch, fancy garters worn below the knee and a mirror fastened to her wrist.”

"Madame Delait pruning roses"

She was a French bearded lady from Thaon-les-Vosges, Lorraine region of eastern France. She run a local pub with her husband in the town and used to shave regularly until 1900.

In 1901, she visited the carnival of Nancy with her husband and saw a bearded woman there. Upon returning to the town, one of the regulars in the pub offered her 500 Francs (roughly 5k USD in today's money) if she let her beard grow. Even though she never get the money, she kept the beard and renamed the pub to Le Café de La Femme à Barbe, "The café of the Bearded Woman".

She became a kind of celebrity, by selling postcards and photographs (in relatively feminine settings at the beginning, later she even got a special permission from the authorities to wear men's clothes at her leisure, which was illegal at the time). She also toured in Europe and became even more famous during WW1 when she joined the Red-Cross and became the mascot of the Poilu (French infantrymen with lower class background).

Felice Casorati