In 1932, a photograph of Clara Bow circulated that would look deeply alarming to modern eyes. The silent film star — known worldwide as Hollywood’s “It Girl” — was photographed wearing a stylish cloche hat and a top decorated with swastikas. But the story behind that image is rooted in a very different time, with a very different understanding of that symbol.
Clara Bow was born in Brooklyn in 1905 and rose to fame during the silent film era. Her electric screen presence made her the face of the Roaring Twenties — bold, vivacious, and utterly magnetic. By 1932, she was one of the most recognized women in the world. The photograph was taken by Eugene Robert Richee, Paramount Pictures’ celebrated portrait photographer, known for capturing the full personality of his subjects in a single frame.
To understand why swastikas appeared on Clara’s clothing, the symbol’s long history matters enormously. The word “swastika” comes from the Sanskrit word “svastika,” meaning “good fortune” or “well-being.” For thousands of years, the symbol appeared across vastly different cultures — ancient India, Native American tribes, early European civilizations, and beyond. It was a widely recognized emblem of luck, health, and prosperity.
By the 1920s, the swastika had worked its way into Western popular culture. It appeared on postcards, in advertisements, on household items, and in clothing designs. It carried no political meaning in this context. The symbol was particularly associated with good luck in aviation, a field that was just beginning to grip the public imagination. Wearing a swastika pattern in 1932 was no more provocative than wearing a four-leaf clover today.
When Richee photographed Clara in 1932, the Nazi Party in Germany was still considered a fringe political movement. Adolf Hitler did not rise to power until 1933 — a full year after this image was taken. It was only after Hitler’s ascension that the Nazis systematically rebranded the swastika as a symbol of Aryan supremacy, stripping away every association it previously held. The atrocities that would become forever tied to that symbol were, at the time of Clara’s photo shoot, completely unforeseeable to the general public.
The photograph, then, is less a scandal than a timestamp. It captures a precise moment — late 1932 — when a symbol that had carried positive meaning for millennia still belonged to the world at large. Richee’s lens caught Clara Bow in peak Hollywood glamour, dressed in the fashion of her era, unaware that within a year the decorative pattern on her clothing would be permanently and catastrophically redefined.
