1920s Fashion

August 30, 2007 at 6:46 am (1920s overview)

A little toe tapping background to get you in the mood- Are your speakers turned on? I defy you to keep your shoulders still and your foot on the floor for this little gem of a video that gives a really quick overview of the 1920s fashion era, its gangsters, flapper accessories and dance steps ( as I was typing this I found myself hitting the keys to the Charleston number!) Grab a coffee, or something more befitting the era and persevere with the 6 minutes, it’s worth it.

The music alone puts you ‘in the mood’ and with a few up and coming videos I’m going to show you, I hope to whet your appetite with the 1920s fashion style and entice you to try your own version of Flapper dressing. Remember, you can still just try the ‘look’ with a 1920s costume first.

1920s Fashion gems are lurking in the sales tubs at present too, in the form of embroidered shawls (ethnic clothing ) wraps and long glittery necklaces a la Flapper style- lots of glass beads and ornate ‘filigree’ type silver and don’t forget the feather boas.

If you are handy with a sewing machine, or you are a master at beading or embroidery, there are many aspects of the 1920s fashion look that are a ‘must’ for inclusion your wardrobe. It’s just a case of adaptation.

The 1920s fashions were SO practical and comfortable that I have to say again, LAYERS are great for ‘illusion’ girls! While wools, slinky knits, faux fur and long skirts were wonderful for Winter, with the warmer weather approaching there will be DELICIOUS excuses to indulge in swishy fabrics and soft, casual layering. Thank goodness jewellery and ‘girlie stuff’ is still IN- a 2007 Flapper Girl would not be seen dead without her accessories!

No, I haven’t forgotten about the 1920s fashion in hairstyles- I’ll pop up another video soon with a DIY home demo of the ‘Bob’!

Hope you enjoyed the video- go on- watch it again to put you in the mood for …whatever!

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1920s fashion

August 28, 2007 at 5:59 am (New 1920s Book)

How the Flapper Invented Modern Times- In looking for the latest sweetmeats on 1920s fashion, I came across a new book by Joshua Zeitz that is discounted at present. You won’t be surprised to read that parents back then were having the same issues as today’s ‘modern’ parents. Here is Joshua’s overview, I hope you enjoy the book.

“In researching my new book, Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern—on the 1920s flapper, that notorious character type who bobbed her hair, smoked cigarettes, drank gin, sported short skirts, and passed her evenings in steamy jazz clubs, where she danced in a shockingly immodest fashion with a revolving cast of male suitors—I was surprised to discover how familiar America’s Jazz Age seems to the modern eye.
In late 1924 the husband-and-wife sociologist team of Robert and Helen Lynd embarked for Muncie, Indiana, where they began a yearlong study of a “typical” American city. What they found could easily describe the typical American suburb in 2006. Teenagers were in the thrall of fashion and celebrity. Young girls fought with their mothers over the length of their skirts and the amount of makeup applied to their faces. Boys argued with their fathers over the use of the family car.
Public culture in the 1920s was suffused with sexual imagery, as ordinary Midwesterners rushed to buy up real-life glossies like True Confessions, Telling Tales, True Story, and Flapper Experiences, which ran stories with such lurid headlines as indolent kisses and the primitive lover (“She wanted a caveman husband”). Advertisements featuring scantily dressed Egyptian women guaranteed the “beauty secret of Cleopatra hidden in every cake” of Palmolive soap. Popular songs of the era included “Hot Lips,” “I Need Lovin’,” and “Burning Kisses.”
In effect, the 1920s heralded America’s entry into the modern era. It was the first decade when the nation came under the full influence of advertising, consumer culture, movies, and radio. In a new world that was defined more by the city than the farm, Americans responded with enthusiasm to the promise of abundance and leisure. Their new watchword was fun; their new goal, fulfillment; their new obsession, sex.
If fun was the watchword of the younger generation, so was choice. Living in a world increasingly dominated by magazine ads for makeup, furniture, and clothing, many Americans began applying the idea of the free market in surprising contexts. A news item dated August 1923 brilliantly captured the tensions that the country’s new consumer dogma could inspire.
“This little city of Somerset [Pennsylvania] has been somersaulted into a style class war,” reported The New York Times, “with the bobbed hair, lip-stick flappers arrayed on one side and their sisters of long tresses and silkless stockings on the other.” When the local high school PTA convened to endorse a new dress code that would bar silk stockings, short skirts, bobbed hair, and sleeveless dresses, the flapper contingent defiantly broke into the meeting and chanted:
I can show my shoulders,
I can show my knees,
I’m a free-born American,
And can show what I please.
These young, self-styled flappers weren’t just trying to have fun; they were asserting their right to make personal choices.
If the Flapperwas the envy of teenage girls everywhere, to others she was a scourge of good character and morals. “Concern —and consternation—about the flapper are general,” observed a popular newspaper columnist of the day. “She disports herself flagrantly in the public eye, and there is no keeping her out of grown-up company or conversation. Roughly, the world is divided into those who delight in her, those who fear her and those who try pathetically to take her as a matter of course.”
The U.S. Secretary of Labor decried the “flippancy of the cigarette-smoking, cocktail-drinking flapper.” A Harvard psychologist reported that flappers possessed the “lowest degree of intelligence” and posed “a hopeless problem for educators.” In 1929 the Florida legislature even considered banning use of the term flapper, so infamous was her character.
In effect, the flapper was a magnet for both abuse and adulation because she incarnated the tensions of her age. No one better understood the social revolution that was afoot than Bruce Bliven of The New Republic. In 1925 Bliven informed his readers that “women have highly resolved that they are just as good as men and intend to be treated so. They don’t mean to have any more unwanted children. They do not intend to be debarred from any profession or occupation which they choose to enter… . If they should elect to go naked nothing is more certain than that naked they will go, while from the sidelines to which he has been relegated mere man is vouchsafed permission only to pipe a feeble Hurrah!”
To which Bliven concluded: “Hurrah!”

What do you call that condition where you focus on red cars and then see them everywhere you go? Well, beware, once you get into 1920s fashion, you will feel it tapping you on the shoulder at the hairdressers, in the haberdashery department and as you flick along the clothing racks! It’s addictive. More on hairstyles later.

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1920s fashion

August 27, 2007 at 11:45 am (1920s fashion for all)

Something for everyBODY..every sex…and every age – “Insatiabilis!” No- not a Harry Potter spell but a term used by Alfredo Panzini in 1921 to describe the new woman of the 1920’s fashion era- “The Flapper
 “One about to spring into a free, joyous life – free from the shackles of housework and husband!” wrote Alf . This seductive, independent woman on the street was a radical departure from the quiet, subservient woman of the house. Does this sound like you? (just joking) Flapper women of the 1920s were free to smoke, drink, drive, vote, choose their mate, their make up, clothes and destiny (by the way, the term ‘flapper’ came from the flapping noise that was made by young women’s galoshes as they walked along in them without buckling them up.)
1920’s fashion had an amazing aura around it, more than any other style, I think, we HEARD it, through the jazz and the Glenn Miller saxophones. It got under our skin through the Charleston and the swinging fringes. It glittered and sparkled with its beaded frocks and Art Deco surroundings. It made us women feel sexy!

1920s fashion still influences Hollywoood stars and is likely to shape the future of fashion forever. Where would Paris Hilton be without the flapper?
Okay, ladies, regardless of whether you are a size 10 or a plus size, the 1920s fashion style has something that can be modified to flatter you. Doh! Trinny and Susannah (What Not to Wear) would probably recommend Magic Knickers though as under garments which, in my experience, while not exerting 80 pounds of pressure on our internal organs are not that far removed from the corset and just as hard to get into to!
Whenever I visit Mum in the UK one of my favourite ‘things to do’ is to walk up to ‘Bygone Days’ in the village developed in the old cotton weaving sheds, the place is a vast Aladdin’s Cave of antiques and memorabilia that is crammed full of goodies from days gone by. Thank goodness they have a café and toilets inside – I defy anyone who loves this type of stuff to get out within 3 hours! Whether it’s beaded purses, tiny calfskin gloves or vintage furs that entice you down aisle after aisle, you have to wonder about the owners and what they ‘got up to’ on those nights they were all ‘dolled up’. I still remember stories from my Grandmother about throwing a bundle of clothes out the bedroom window to elder sister ‘Elsie’ so she could get ‘dolled up’ and nick off to the local dance after leaving the house in the dark.
After the end of World War 1, this timeless fashion era of the 1920s found everyone ready to party and party they did! Despite the darker side of organized crime, money laundering, gang murders and illegal gambling, the air was buzzing with excitement. People needed to heal the wounds of war both physically and more importantly, emotionally.

A rip roarin’ time was to be had at the local ‘speakeasy’ and new ‘night clubs’, where illicit booze oiled the limbs and lungs of dancers, crooners and comedians. The young flappers rolled down their stockings, bobbed their hair and flaunted cigarettes and strong liquor. Boy, do we owe those girls for flinging off their corsets, bobbing their hair and charlestoning their way to earn the right to make choices. Thank you, thank you. Those young women could not have predicted that the stylish threads of their ‘shocking’ outfits and rebellious lifestyles would be anything but threadbare in the fabric of today’s ‘modern woman’.
The flapper fashion was launched by Coco Chanel tying a scarf around the waist of an oversized man’s sweater so by golly, surely we can pick the eyes out of it for an elegant evening dress or opt for a wild and indulgent mystery night with the girls? (more of this later)

1920s fashion was comfortable for all shapes and sizes, it allowed easy movement, elegant layering (covers a multitude of ripples and bulges) and a choice of hemlines and with today’s delicious offerings of long beaded necklaces, feathers and headbands there’s no risk in a bit of ‘toe dipping’ for fun.

If you could do a ‘Nania’ and step into your built – in robe to revisit the Roaring Twenties who would you choose to be- a flapper, moll or gangster?
Would you step out of your Studebaker, on the arm of a dapper, horn rimmed bespectacled young man in his zoot suit ready to dance the night away in a cloud of Chanel No.5? . Don’t tell me there aren’t moments when you wouldn’t get a kick out of getting ‘dolled up ‘and fantasizing too, especially if you knew you were being ’naughty’? If you want to ‘try the look’, without it costing you much then why not host 1920s costume night?.
Be bold, be daring, think outside the square. Next time you’re in the mood to shop, give the 1920s fashion a thought – play with layers, below or above the knee, there are some gorgeous blousy tops and tubular skirts just begging for a glitzy necklace and a beaded purse- those 1920s fashionistas knew how to do it. AND don’t forget the shoes- there are some ‘to die for’ 20s styles out there at present. Not a fringe freak? No worries, play slinkies with a silky shawl. That dapper partner of yours won’t know what hit him!

We may have dipped out on the 1920s fashion era ladies but we are STILL “Insatiabilis!”

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