Tortures in Name of Fashion

Albert Payson Terhune's illustrated essay combines text and image to critique fashionable practices inflicted on animals. The piece shows a woman with a small dog, its fur styled according to contemporary grooming trends. Terhune contrasts human vanity with animal suffering, arguing that ear-cropping, hair-plucking, and other modifications cause genuine pain. The column format—dense letterpress anchoring a single large illustration—typifies early twentieth-century newspaper layout, where cartoons and satirical drawings reinforced topical arguments. This hybrid text-image approach preceded the visual-dominant comic strip, yet shares its fundamental grammar: image paired with prose to amplify social commentary.