Was a photo of six men in striped bathing suits from a men's beauty contest in 1919? No, that's not true: The photograph is actually of several central European men around the year 1910. The photo can be traced back to a German website that sells postcards. The caption for it on the site is roughly translated to "nicer through stripes Central Europe around 1910."
The claim appeared in a Facebook post (archived here) by History Daily on April 26, 2021.
It opened:
The finalists in a men's beauty contest, 1919.
This is what the post looked like on Facebook on April 29, 2021:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Thu Apr 29 14:36:50 2021 UTC)
Lead Stories found the same image for sale at Winkler Postkarten, a German postcard website. We emailed Sebastian Winkler, the owner of the Winkler Postkarten, for a comment on April 30, 2021. He responded the same day: "It's true, it's a postcard of my store, this photo is part of my archive."
A blog post from Angus Trumble, former director of the National Portrait Gallery of Australia in Canberra, provided a bit more information. "Last evening over an early dinner in New York a dear old friend visiting from Australia gave me this postcard which he found lately in a museum bookshop in Germany," he wrote on May 19, 2012. "The caption reads Schöner durch Streifen. Mitteleuropa um 1910."
