Calling cards

Lonely this Valentine's Day? These 19th Century calling cards are guaranteed to score you a date.

Street gangs in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and other urban centers have various ways of identifying (or shall we say, branding?) themselves—think bandanas, hoodies, jackets, etc. As the book Compliments of Chicagohoodz: Chicago Street Gang Art & Culture (Feral House) shows, there are uniquely Chicago ways of marking turf and being unified with a group. In his foreword to the book, Anthony Haden-Guest reveals a particular form of Windy City street literature: compliment ca

Lonely this Valentine's Day? These 19th Century calling cards are guaranteed to score you a date.

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These fantastic introduction cards were used in the United States during the 1870s and 1880s. According to Alan Mays, who collects them, they were “used by the less formal male in approaches to the less formal female.” We think of nineteenth-century courtship as being impossibly straight-laced and buttoned-down, and certainly a printed card inquiring for permission to accompany a young miss to her door is consistent with that, but the eager men found plenty of ways to work clever jokes and…

Without Facebook, online dating sites and lest we dare mention applications like Tinder, in the 19th century, single boys and girls had to be a little more inventive with their dating game. And thus, the American 'escort card' or 'invitation card' was introduced. It wasn't exactly used in high socie

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Consider it the Victorian-era version of OKCupid

We Are Supervision has shown off a lesser known snippet of Chicago’s history: Gang cards. Apparently it was common practice ca. 1980 for Chicago gangs to put together their own business cards to impress, intimidate, whatever. It’s a bit of outsider history with a homespun aethetic. The names of the members are often included. We […]

In 19th-century America, 'escort cards' - not to be confused with the explicit sort you might imagine today - were handed to women by men who found them attractive.

What follows is a brief history of the calling card and how men today can resurrect this tradition to create some stylish panache in their social interactions.

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Victorian calling cards