Womans 1920s Fashion 20's Flapper Style 1920s Flapper Clothes 1920s Flapper Costume 1920s Flapper Clothing
1920 Flapper Dress Plus Black Flapper Roaring 20 Womans Fashion 1920s Costume Black Flapper Dress
1920s Clothing &
Flapper Clothing
Clothing and outfits for both sexes underwent a revolution in the 1920s costumes.
Styles were produced that had never been seen before, and which frequently shocked the older generation.
New Clothing were lighter, brighter and far less cumbersome than ever before.
Hair Style also
changed dramatically and, combined with the new clothes, gave the Twenties a distinctive look.
Women's Clothes Twenties Flapper Dresses
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Before the war, women had worn elaborate, full length dresses with layers of restrictive
undergarments or more formal dress as dress code.
In the 1920s, body crippling corsets were abandoned, hemlines
rose and rose, and the boyish figure became all the rage. Dress Costume or Frocks as
they were called, were low waisted and by 1926 knee length.
They were often embroidered or decorated
with beads and tassels. To complement the newly revealed legs, sexy stockings became a daring flesh colour
instead of the traditional black.
Favourite accessories were dangling earrings and long necklaces.
Fashionable colours mentioned in an advertisement for frocks, flapper costumes and suits included "Roseda, Orchid,
Bracken, Amethyst and Navy".
The modern young woman, or "sexy flapper" as she was sometimes called with her flapper dress costume or fancy dress
was often bold enough to wear powder, rouge and pale blue eye shadow in the evening and may even have plucked her eyebrows.
Some women were beginning to smoke, not only at home but in public, and this shocked many people.
Children's Clothes
For the first time, children's clothes were designed with children in mind. Before the war, children had been dressed in similar styles to their parents. Again, these clothes were very restrictive and multi layered and not much fun for playing in. Now girls wore simple cotton frocks, cardigans and canvas shoes in the summer, and serge skirts and hand knitted jerseys in the winter. When it was cold, girls also wore liberty bodices, which were like long vests with suspenders attached, to keep up woollen stockings. Boys also had comfortable clothes. Knee length trousers were worn in winter and summer. When it was cold, knee length, turned over socks and woollen jerseys were worn, whilst in the summer short sleeved shirts and Fair Isle slipovers were popular. Boys generally wore short trousers, kept up with braces, until they were 16 or 16. Victorian lace up boots were replaced with lace up shoes for the winter and canvas shoes or sandals for summer.
Babies' clothes were made to be more comfortable and practical, too. No longer were babies
dressed up in yards of lacy, white gown. By the end of the period romper suits, matinee jackets
and short dress were popular.
Men's fashions and outfits also underwent a huge transformation in the Twenties.
Previously most men had worn formal three piece suits. Now they were allowed far more casual
styles as "cheerio" and "jazzy" fashions became acceptable and fancy. Flannel trousers,
tweed jackets and brightly coloured Fair Isle slipovers were very popular, as were Plus
Fours (baggy knicker bockers) and Oxford Bags (trousers with very wide legs). In the summer,
blazers and light coloured trousers were complemented with a panama hat or a boater with fashion poor skill.
By the late 1920s, pipe smoking and after shave were desirable european fashion male accessories.
Roaring 20s Hairstyles And Hats
Before the war, women had been admired for the length of their hair. In the 1920s, almost every
female, whether she was young or old, seemed to cut her hair another sign of liberation and a
completion of the Boyish Look. Short hair was known as a "bob". Variations
included the "shingle", where the hair was cut shorter at the back, and the Eton Crop,
where the hair was given a virtual short back and sides. Marcel Waves (perms) could curl hair,
but for those who could not afford that, rags left in the hair overnight were the only alternative.
Men's hairstyles also changed and the short back and sides became popular. (Previously men, too,
had worn their hair longer.)
Hats were worn by everyone, including children. Women and girls wore head hugging "Cloche" hats,
often pulled way down over the ears and eyes. Boys wore caps, while men could choose from trilbys,
Homburgs, Derbys, bowlers, panamas and boaters, to name a few.
Extract from “Growing up in The 1920s”, written by Amanda Clark. London: B.T.Batsford Ltd, 1986.
Although in agreement concerning the revolutionary nature of the flapper’s new attitudes,
many experts clash with respect to the spirit of her aforementioned physical appearance. Valerie
Steele argues that the ideal was not boyish, as Roberts and Yarwood suggest, but “youthful” --
“girlish immaturity,” she states, carried the day.” Alison Lurie similarly notes that women “did
not look like men, but rather like children.“i6 The openly sexual flapper who adopted
masculinity was clearly a dangerous individual; she who resembled the female child would
appear to be less threatening. She was not. A certain psychoanalyst, one who had recently been
making a substantial impact on the American consciousness, perhaps best articulates this fact.
Sigmund Freud, in “New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis,” stated quite simply that “the
little girl is a little man.“17 Similarly, in “Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex,” he declared
that the little girl’s sexuality “has altogether a male character.“” A wave of repression during
puberty is needed for the girl to discard this “masculine sexuality” and “emerge” as a woman;”
flappers, then, would apparently have failed to make such a transition.
As the above illustrates, the flapper -- be she boyish or childish -- proved quite a threat.
Roberts, in a compelling discussion of the post-war French male mindset, argues that this
sexually ambiguous creature wreaked havoc on French society, resulting in everything from
lawsuits against hairdressers to the dissolution of families.20 Yet these often violent reactions to
the new woman’s attire and/or hairstyle were not, in Roberts’ opinion, simply due to their
“novelty:’ -- the fact that the look was such a drastic departure from that of the Gibson girl of
years past. Something else propelled the obsession. The radical feminist Henriette Sauret is
quoted as poking fun at the male journalists of the time, whom, though confronted with news
items such as the end of the war and the “threat” of Bolshevism, still devoted “a good third of
their daily remarks” to the flapper’s bobbed hair.21
Yellis offers insight into the driving force behind such an obsession. Citing women’s
entrance into the worlds of both business and the comer saloon, he discusses the shock inherent
in the shift from Victorian notions of womanhood to that of the smoking, drinking, sexually
assertive flapper. According to Yellis, both her actions as well as her attire were “seen as a
sexual assault, and it was obvious to the men that they were its objects.“22 A 1924 cartoon by
Max Beerbohm, entitled “The Insurgence of Youth,“23 serves to best illustrate the pressing nature
of the threat; just one glance perfectly articulates the crisis of masculinity and its disastrous effect
on men. The animated flapper, with her boyish torso, masculine body language and bobbed
haircut, has forced her companion to squeeze effeminately onto the comer of the couch as she
assumes the dominant role. Their dialogue indicates that she is not only in command physically,
but intellectually as well -having the “nerve” to use whatever expletives she pleases.
