FASHION and travel are intimately connected in the Canadian periodical discourse of the early to mid-twentieth century. This October 1927 editorial, introducing Mayfair's new Paris correspondent, constructs well-dressed, ‘smart people’ as travellers and, conversely, presents travel itself as a fashionable practice. More broadly, the editorial reinforces the connection between fashion and cosmopolitanism. A familiarity with the latest silhouettes implies familiarity with Paris, the French Riviera, and other European resorts. Those readers who could not, in reality, hope to travel to these places might at least acquire knowledge of them—at the same time as they learned what was mostly worn there—through the pages of the magazines themselves. Indeed, specialist knowledge is exactly what Mayfair is selling: it presents not only images but also ‘modish ideas’ and authenticated information, enabling readers to become experts in the ‘serious business’ of dress.

Fashions, in Canadian magazines, almost always come from elsewhere. Paris dominated; London was an influence (particularly for menswear, and during wartime) and New York became increasingly important, while a Canadian fashion industry did not begin to develop until the 1950s. In the realm of dress, as in other areas, mainstream Canadian magazines became both exhibition spaces and marketplaces for imported foreign styles.