Description
Collector's Note – Why This Issue Matters
December 1948 arrived at a specific and consequential moment in the history of American teenage girlhood — and in the history of Seventeen Magazine itself. The magazine had launched in September 1944, founded by Walter Annenberg and edited by Enid Haupt, with the then-novel proposition that teenage girls constituted a distinct consumer and cultural audience worthy of their own dedicated publication. By December 1948 it had spent four years actively constructing that audience's identity: what teenage girls should wear, aspire to, read, and become. The holiday issue, with its cover theme of "Faille and Taffeta Go Calling on Xmas," documents the magazine's particular version of postwar teenage femininity — aspirational, elegantly dressed, oriented toward social participation and the pleasures of the holiday season. Seventeen's archive across the late 1940s is a primary source record of how American teenage female identity was being constructed and marketed in the immediate postwar years, and the December issues in particular capture the intersection of fashion aspiration and holiday culture that defined the magazine's most commercially important editorial moment of the year.
The specific fabric references in this issue's cover theme — faille and taffeta — are themselves period documents of considerable historical interest to fashion historians. Both fabrics were characteristic of postwar formal and semi-formal dressing: faille, with its distinctive ribbed texture, and taffeta, with its crisp hand and rustling quality, were the materials of choice for the kind of "going calling" or holiday visiting dress that the cover depicts. The postwar years had brought an end to wartime fabric restrictions, and the American fashion industry was actively encouraging a return to elaborately constructed, fabric-intensive clothing — the foundation of what would culminate in Dior's New Look and its American adaptations. A December 1948 Seventeen cover positioning teenage girls within that aesthetic argument is a document of how that fashion moment was being communicated downward through the age demographic. The broader magazine landscape of 1948 captures postwar American culture at a moment of genuine optimism and reconstruction, and Seventeen's holiday issue that year reflects the decade's particular brand of aspirational femininity at its most seasonal and concentrated.
About the Publication
Seventeen Magazine, founded in 1944 by Triangle Publications and edited in its early years by Enid Haupt, was the first major American magazine conceived specifically for teenage girls — a demographic that had previously been addressed only as a subset of women's magazine readership. Its editorial formula combined fashion, beauty, fiction, and lifestyle content calibrated to readers between roughly thirteen and nineteen years of age, treating them as a distinct consumer and cultural audience with their own tastes, concerns, and aspirations. By 1948 it had established itself as the dominant publication in its category and was actively shaping the commercial and cultural definition of American teenage girlhood. Its holiday issues were among the most eagerly anticipated of the year, combining the season's fashion coverage with the particular emotional register of Christmas as a social and family occasion.
Key Highlights Inside
- Cover theme: "Faille and Taffeta Go Calling on Xmas." A holiday fashion cover specifically featuring the postwar formal fabrics that characterized aspirational teenage dressing in the late 1940s — a precise document of the era's fashion language as it was communicated to a teenage female audience.
- Holiday fashion coverage for teenage girls. As Seventeen's December issue, the editorial well would have centered on holiday dressing, party clothes, and gift-giving in a format calibrated to the teenage reader's social calendar and budget — a specific and historically bounded vision of Christmas femininity.
- Late-1940s beauty and lifestyle content. Seventeen's December issues from this period combined fashion with beauty advice, fiction, and cultural content that together constitute a primary source record of what the magazine's editors believed teenage girls needed and wanted in the immediate postwar years.
- Period advertising as historical document. A December 1948 Seventeen would have carried advertising specifically targeted at teenage girls and their parents during the holiday shopping season — a commercially significant record of the products and brands that were defining the emerging teen consumer market in the late 1940s.
Condition & Rarity
December issues of Seventeen from 1948 present preservation challenges specific to their age and format. At seventy-five-plus years old, paper stock from this era is highly susceptible to tanning, edge brittleness, and the structural wear that accumulates over decades of storage. The listing describes this issue as in good condition with minor wear throughout, binding wear, marks on the back cover, no address label, and protective plastic sleeving — a condition profile that is honest and representative for a late-1940s monthly magazine of this type. The absence of a mailing label is a meaningful positive: subscription copies with label adhesion damage are more common in the surviving market than clean-cover newsstand examples. Binding wear is expected for a magazine of this age and does not typically indicate page loss. The marks on the back cover are a noted imperfection that affects the reverse side of the issue rather than the cover art or interior content. Protective plastic covering indicates deliberate preservation. For a nearly eight-decade-old teenage fashion monthly, a surviving copy in good readable condition with intact pages and a clean front cover represents a find that fashion historians and collectors of postwar American print culture will recognize as above-average.
Looking for More Issues Like This?
A December 1948 Seventeen in good condition with a label-free cover is a specific find for collectors of postwar American fashion history and vintage teenage culture ephemera — issues from the magazine's founding decade are considerably less common in the collector market than those from later periods. The Seventeen Magazine collection at OriginalMagazines.com is the most comprehensive place to browse for other issues spanning the magazine's long run, including additional late-1940s and early-1950s editions from this foundational period in American teenage culture. For collectors interested in the broader postwar cultural moment this issue inhabits, the 1948 magazine collection covers publications across fashion, news, and culture from across that significant transitional year.