I have been enamored of anything 20’s and 30’s for a very long. I read anything I can get my hands on that talks about the clothes, the mores, the artists (fashion designers, writers, painters, sculptors…), the characters and love it all!!!! I can speak the language and dress the part! I guess I could walk the walk-maybe that means the Charleston?
I recently came across a book simply and perfectly titled, “Flapper” and it is the bees knees!! It tells how the flappers came to be in America, how they reacted to political and social events on the world stage and how they changed that political and social history to modernize America-how they fit into the world’s history at large. It talks about F. Scott Fitzgerald being her American chronicler in novels; it talks about Harold Ross and Dorothy Parker being the weekly teller of flapper stories in the brand new New Yorker Magazine. I have been introduced to Lois Long, the nightlife columnist from the very beginning of the New Yorker’s history and I have fallen in love with her! Her writing and her quips are up there with the best of them-Dorothy Parker and Oscar Wilde. I am planning a trip to the Donnell Library in NYC) to look up old New Yorkers so I can read her articles as there seem to be no biographies of her. According to Joshua Zeitz, the author she “invented” fashion writing as the NYer didn’t publish pictures and had only words at her disposal-but what a picture she could paint. I LOL when she is quoted and I read a few pieces on-line this morning after having Googled her. I came across this blog in my search http://thepaintedwoman.blogspot.com and sneaking reads all day in my office. I’ve even been calling friends to read them quips!
“Flapper” tells us how important Poiret and Chanel (of cawse she was, daa—ling!!) were to fashionable (and wealthy flappers) and their shocking new hemlines. It tells us it’s the first time in history there was a generation gap the ultra conservative Victorian parents on one side and the moderne free flappers (both men and women, but mostly women) on the other. For the first time in history women could work, could live in an apartment, could smoke, drink, and dance all night long frankly, it was the first time women could walk. Poiret and Chanel took away their corsets so they could finally take enough air into their lungs to “finance” a purposeful stride. Their skirts to their knee!! Qu’elle Scandale! They wore makeup and loved it. Their parents had no idea how to rein them in nor could they anyway, the movement was too big. It was the first major, worldwide social upheaval that predated the 60’s by 40 years.
The book talks about how the movie industry develops and how the three flapper actresses Clara Bow, Louise Brooks and Colleen Moore develop and mirror girls’ lives all over the country. It talks about the disappointment the early suffragettes and feminists were with what these girls did their hard won freedoms they now had-the girls weren’t political, they wanted fun! In silk stockings! It talks about the terrible (and tragic) discrimination against black people-even as the girls were invading the ultra cool dance clubs in Harlem, it talks about the huge disparities in income-the poor were REALLY poor and the rich were REALLY rich. The middle class wasn’t very large in the decade. Girls, who could finally work, getting out from under their Victorian parents thumbs were REALLY poor but they loved it as it gave them independence! Something unmarried young women never had before. The decade saw early inventions which were the beginning of the technologies that we know of and take for granted today.
I have learned so much from this whirlwind of a book and I have only 80 pages left so will finish over the weekend-I do not look forward to finishing it or to seeing the demise of my beloved decade with the Depression.