What Flappers Stood For
(Flapper Magazine, 1922)
Here is a page listing everything that the Flappers adored and found worth getting up in the morning to pursue.
Fashion
The Beginning of the End
(Collier’s Magazine, 1941)
This article heralds the slippery slope in men’s fashion. Our’s is the era in which it is not odd to see billion-dollar businesses being run by men in flipflops and gym shorts – this is a far cry from how their grandfathers would have dressed were they in the same position. The well-respected fashion journalist (Henry L. Jackson, 1911 – 1948: co-founder of Esquire)
opined in this article that it was suitable for men to cease wearing the darker hues to the office and wear country tweeds; next stop – flipflops.
Fashion Notes from London
(Vanity Fair Magazine, 1923)
Written in a prose style reminiscent of an owner’s manual, these pages spell out the 1923 tailoring rules for men’s formalwear:
“Essentially traditionalist in matter of men’s clothes, London is never more
conservative than in dress clothes, and the changes from year to year are of the slightest… However, one still sees far more dinner jackets (ie. “tuxedos“) in restaurants than of yore, when black tie and short coat were for the home circle and the club alone, but in society, whether for small dance, ball, dinner or theatre party, the white tie is the rule.”
April is the Cruelest Month
(Vanity Fair Magazine, 1923)
“With the double-breasted coat, the single-breasted waistcoat is the rule and to repeat the crossing of lines twice in one suit is an entirely unreasonable exaggeration.”
Skirt Length: High or Low?
(Vanity Fair Magazine, 1923)
“The important question of the proper length of dress skirts is again racking the public press and putting a large part of our female population completely off their feed.”
Stockings for Movie Stars
$2,500.00 stockings, anyone? (in today’s currency, that would be $41,519.00) This is the story of Hollywood’s go-to-guy for outrageously priced,
Pants for Women Become a Thing
The battle over pants for women had been going on long before this article came to press. Keeping in mind
The Mad Plaid of 1940
(Collier’s Magazine, 1940)
Fashion writer Henry Jackson had a few words to say concerning the importance of Glen Plaid in men’s fashions during the Fall of 1940.
The Well Dressed Man Confronts Bad Taste
(Vanity Fair Magazine, 1918)
On page one of this three page guide, you will find some essential notes and illustrations from the editors of Vanity Fair regarding the good taste of 1918 (as well as the simply awful).
‘A Flapper’s Appeal to Parents”
(The Outlook, 1922)
If one judges by appearances, I suppose I am a flapper. I am within the age limit, I wear bobbed hair, the badge of flapperhood. I powder my nose. I wear fringed skirts and bright colored sweaters, and scarves and waists with Peter Pan collars and low-heeled ‘finale hopper’ shoes. I adore to dance… But then there are many degrees of a flapper. There is the semi-flapper, the flapper, the super-flapper. Each of these three main general divisions has its degrees of variation. I might possibly be placed somewhere in the middle of the first class.
The Revolution in 1920s Fashion
(Saturday Review of Literature, 1925)
A clever observer of the passing scene typed these words about the social revolution that he had been witnessing for the past six years:
In those dark ages before the war women’s fashions changed from year to year, but generally speaking at the dress-makers word of command…The first short skirt sounded the knell of his dictatorship, and since then womanhood has never looked back…I say again that [today’s fashion] is a phenomenon which the social historian appears to be passing over.
Click here to read about the fashion coup of 1922.
Ode to Feminine Knees
(Flapper Magazine, 1922)
When the skirt hems began to rise in the Twenties, it was widely understood that the vision of a woman’s leg was a rare treat for both man and boy; a spectacle that had not been enjoyed since the days of Adam (married men excluded). The flappers certainly knew this, and they generally believed that suffering the dizzying enthusiasm of the male of the species was a small price to pay in order to secure some element of liberty. The flappers liked their hem-lengths just where they were and, thank you very much, they were not about to drop them. Attached are some verses by an anonymous flapper who expressed her reaction regarding all that undeserved male attention her knees were generating.
Jihad Against ‘The New Look’
(See Magazine, 1948)
A former fashion model, Bobbie Woodward, was outraged when she awoke that morning in 1947 to find that the hidden hairy hand that decides which direction the fashion winds will blow had given the nod to some snail-eating Frenchman who stood athwart fashion’s unspoken promise to continue the skirt hem’s march ever-upward. Wasting no time, she quickly marshaled other equally inclined women and formed The Little Below the Knee Clubs, which spread to forty-eight states (as well as Canada) in order to let the fashion establishment know that they would not be forced into wearing this fashion juggernaut known as The New Look.
The attached SEE MAGAZINE article serves as a photo-essay documenting the collective outrage of these women and their doomed crusade against Christian Dior.
One 1947 fashion critic believed that the New Look suffered from a split personality. Click here to read her review.
The Ex-Soldier-Goes Shopping
(Collier’s Magazine, 1945)
In light of the fact that all Army personnel would be issued $300 with their honorable discharge papers, the fashion editor for Esquire Magazine, Henry Jackson, decided to moonlight at Collier’s in order to provide some solid fashion-tips on how best to spend that hard-earned cash.
Turning Back The Fashion Revolution
(Literary Digest, 1929)
Periodically we run across articles on this subject and it makes us sit up and recognize that this must have been a constant fear for numerous women (and fashion journalists) during the Twenties. Each article centers on a widespread belief that the Deep State behind the fashion industry had plans afoot to force women back into long skirts and corsets and that women would not be allowed any say in the matter.
Click here to read a similar article and here to read our other article on the subject.
The Black Dress Arrives
(The New Republic, 1921)
The attached article is by an unidentified, pointy-headed male, and regardless of the fact that it was written over 100 years ago, many of his reflections regarding fashion and those who are enslaved by it are still relevant in our own time. It all started for this fellow when he felt the urge to understand why such a broad variety of New York women should take to wearing black for each and every occasion and so he polished-up the ol’ cranium, rolled up his sleeves and began to think hard about the nature of fashion. He concluded that the lot of the female fashion victim
is not the ordinary story of women’s victimization, her subjection in a man-made world. She, after all, accepts of herself this silent decree of fashion and rushes to it. It is woman-made, this particular enslavement
The Spirit of Flappers
(NY Times, 1922)
Speaking about why she loved the Twenties, Diana Vreeland (1903 – 1989) – observant fashion editor and unique fashion phenomenon, once remarked on a chat show that there’s never been a woman with her clothes chopped off at the knee in history. Indeed – Vreeland would find the attached article about flappers to be spot-on.