Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity & the Women Who Made America Modern

by Joshua Zeitz

  Androgyny didn’t go hand in hand with asexuality. Quite the contrary. Flapper fashion regularly incorporated “Oriental” or “primitive” themes drawn from sub-Saharan and Asian civilizations, like skullcaps adorned with Egyptian textiles; hat designs by the French milliner Agnès that were “suggested by an African Head-Dress”; wooden-and-gold bangles, “slave collars,” and “slave bracelets”; and an “exotic toque from Alex,” “trimmed with cross in tête de nègre.”26 In the context of the 1920s, to borrow “Oriental” themes was to suffuse one’s designs with raw sexual power.

  This borrowing from other cultures reflected the greater contact that Americans and Europeans enjoyed with non-Western peoples in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, courtesy of imperialism and global trade. When white Europeans wrote, talked about, and analyzed these people—tasks to which they devoted considerable time and effort—they often contrasted their own state of overcivilization with the alleged raw, primitive instinct of the “Orient.” In “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,” Sigmund Freud concluded in 1915 that “white nations” enforced a “renunciation of instinctual satisfactions,” whereas nonwhite societies encouraged the realization of human urges.

  Popular and pseudoscientific tracts on the raw sexuality of “primitive” peoples—volumes like Ernest Crawley’s Studies of Savages and Sex (1929) and Bronislaw Malinowski’s The Sexual Life of Savages (1929)—drove home precisely this point. The white American journalist Ray Stannard Baker best summed up prevailing ideas about exoticism when he explained, “If civilization means anything, it means self-restraint; casting away self-restraint the white man becomes as savage as the negro.”

  In weaving so-called primitive or Oriental themes into their wares, leading couture houses were assigning the modern woman a new, unspoken sexual power popularly associated with darker, non-Western peoples. It was an idea that worked in concert with other features of flapper design.

  The most familiar ingredient of flapper fashion was the creeping hemline, which culminated sometime in 1925 or 1926 with skirts that fell fourteen inches above the ground. “ ‘The hemline moveth slowly up and nowhere doth abide,’ ” reported the Washington Post’s fashion critic in 1925.27 Two years later, The New York Times marveled at the new spring lineup from Paris. DISPLAY OF SPRING FASHIONS SHOWS THEM BARELY LONG ENOUGH TO COVER KNEES, readers learned.28

  The trend scandalized defenders of the old order, who were particularly alarmed by the sight of bare legs—a result of the preference for sheer stockings that quickly became a feature of the garçonne look.29 A Baptist pastor offered the following object lesson to his congregates:

  Mary had a little skirt,

  The latest style no doubt,

  But every time she got inside,

  She was more than halfway out.

  Others took it all in stride. Even the conservative Ladies’ Home Journal remarked that “as American women are noted for their pretty feet and ankles, it is pleasant to learn that skirts are going to be short … though one must adjust length to becomingness.”30

  Coco wasn’t the only designer in Paris to raise her hemlines or to make an imprint on flapper fashion. Whereas Chanel’s sleek, boyish models enforced the appearance of a trim and linear figure—often achieved with the help of a breast flattener that deaccentuated all traces of feminine lines—Madeleine Vionnet, one of her chief rivals in women’s couture, pioneered bias-cut designs that emphasized women’s natural curves. By cutting material against the grain—an exceedingly difficult process involving great patience and skill—she was able to create an altogether new effect in dresses and skirts. The bias cut clung to the body and assumed the shape of its subject rather than the other way around.

  Though Vionnet adopted many of the conventions of Chanel’s flapper look, a discerning eye could tell one woman’s imprint from the other. And in the twenties, many women were developing that eye for fashion. Still, by sheer force or personality, it was Coco who dominated the world of couture in the twenties.

  In one of her first fashion columns for The New Yorker, Lois Long mocked other journalists for their “yearly cry” that “bobbed hair is going out; that big hats are to be de rigueur; that skirts are to be longer; and that waistlines are to be reestablished.31 This time, they pin one of their stories on the fact that Mrs. Reginald Vanderbilt insists upon long skirts. They forget that Mrs. Vanderbilt has always worn them.” Ultimately, Long claimed, “what Mrs. Vanderbilt wears and what manufacturers want has no more effect on fashion than Dancing Teachers’ conventions on night clubs.”

  Short skirts, dropped waistlines, and straight silhouettes were here to stay. For that, the world could largely thank Coco Chanel.

  Standing outside the Rainbow Fashion Show in Chicago, 1926, two flappers enjoy the democratizing effects of the ready-to-wear revolution.

  16

  INTO THE STREETS

  IT WAS ONE thing for Coco Chanel and a select group of Parisian couturiers to revolutionize the clothing of those fortunate few women in France and America who could afford to drop hundreds of dollars on an evening gown. But what of the millions more who couldn’t? After all, rich people throughout the ages had slavishly embraced new fads and styles without influencing the purchasing habits of their economic and social inferiors. Why should the 1920s have been any different?

  “The whole position of women in Western civilization,” wrote Madge Garland, a prominent 1920s fashion critic, “her struggle for equality and her success, is reflected in the garments she has worn.”1 In earlier years, this struggle for autonomy and self-definition was limited to those privileged women who could afford to carve out their identities by following the currents of style. Now, with the advent of ready-to-wear clothing, the development of cheaper fabrics and synthetics, and more take-home pay in the pocket of the average working woman, “fashions [became] democratic.”

  By the time Coco made her name in the world of high couture, it took startlingly little time for the latest designs unveiled at rue Cambon to filter their way down to midrange department stores in Muncie, Indiana. More striking still, it took only a short while longer for Chanel’s signature to work its way into the vast American countryside, courtesy of Sears, Roebuck and other mail-order catalogs that brought city fashions right to the doorsteps of American farm families.

  In effect, the flapper look that Chanel helped pioneer wasn’t just for the rich Parisian. It belonged to every woman who wished to claim it as her own. This was a radical concept.

  Until the early twentieth century, most American women made their own clothing. The mass-made, ready-to-wear garments that we take for granted today simply didn’t exist.

  This had been the case for a long time. In 1791, when Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton prepared a report on American manufacturers, some “two-thirds, three-fourths, and even four-fifths of all the clothing of the inhabitants” of the United States were “made by themselves.”2 Twenty years later, the government commissioned yet another study that found more than two-thirds of all American clothes were homemade. The rest were hand crafted by dressmakers and tailors who designed and sewed their wares for wealthy patrons who could afford to enlist their services.

  The status quo changed slowly over the course of the nineteenth century.3 Technological advances like the flying shuttle (1733), which wove broad pieces of material at a quickened pace, the spinning jenny (1764), which improved thread and yarn production, and the power loom, which rendered the old weaving frame obsolete, made it easier to mass-produce fabric. Later developments like the sewing machine—first patented in the United States in 1846—made it possible to assemble precut cloth into finished garments with less time and greater precision.

  But technology was only one engine driving the ready-to-wear revolution. As the American economy matured throughout the nineteenth century, there arose new demand for prefab clothing. Working-class men who lived apart from their families—sailors, miners, lumbermen, railroad crewmen, an
d soldiers, for example—couldn’t turn to their nonexistent wives or absent sisters for a steady supply of homemade wares. Instead, they began patronizing so-called slop shops that offered crude, ready-made pants and shirts at reasonable prices. Usually situated near docks and work camps, these establishments were the first in America to produce clothes in standard form and variable sizes. A few of the pioneer slop shops like Brooks Brothers, which opened its doors around 1818, had evolved into high-end men’s clothiers by the time Coco Chanel arrived on the scene a hundred years later.

  Oddly enough, the ready-to-wear revolution that many observers would later credit with democratizing fashion also had its earliest roots in that most undemocratic of American institutions. Southern planters had better use for their slaves than to let them spend time sewing their own clothing. Instead, they bought coarse garments in bulk from slop shops that sprang up in New York, Cincinnati, and New Orleans especially for the purpose of creating “cheap clothing to supply farmhands and Negro slaves.”

  In the 1860s, when a majority of northerners finally decided that the country couldn’t endure half-slave and half-free, the Civil War ensued, creating an unprecedented demand for soldiers’ uniforms and providing government contractors with a strong motive to perfect methods of sizing their prefabricated coats, pants, shirts, and hats.

  In the years after the Civil War, as America left the age of iron for the age of steel, increasing numbers of American men moved off the self-sufficient farm and into the factory or office. The ready-to-wear industry evolved with the times. By the turn of the century, most men were buying their clothes off the rack. American women would have to wait a bit longer for their own ready-to-wear revolution; most still sewed or commissioned their dresses as late as 1900.

  Nevertheless, standardization was creeping into the market. In the 1850s, an American named Ellen Curtis Demorest—known professionally as Mme. Demorest—invented the paper dress pattern.4 Demorest made a small fortune with her line of simple but elegant blueprints, and within a short space of time, popular women’s journals like Godey’s Lady’s Book and Ladies’ Home Journal were offering middle-class readers similar opportunities to re-create haute fashion at cut-rate prices.

  “A sketch is given of a little French dress that any artful woman can copy with her own needle,” began a typical article.5 A writer for Good Housekeeping advised mothers to “begin to teach early the little girls to do their own mending and to help with the easiest parts of the sewing.”

  These same magazines routinely published instructions on how to revamp old outfits to keep them from looking worn or outdated. Women were urged to convert material from one dress into flounces that concealed the wear and tear on the hemline of another dress. They were taught to let out the bouffant skirt draperies that were in vogue one year in order to create a longer, flowing foundation skirt for the next season. Virtually every woman was at least minimally skilled in the art of sewing.

  But not everyone had the time to devote to Godey’s Lady’s Book. Just as slop shops answered workingmen’s need for unpretentious, ready-made clothing, a new line of entrepreneurs emerged in the late nineteenth century to outfit working women who couldn’t put in twelve-hour shifts at the factory, cook and clean for their families, and sew their own outfits from scratch. At least a few wholesalers and department stores offered working women the opportunity to buy some of the simpler components of their everyday outfits—shirtwaists, long black skirts, hats, cloaks, and shawls.

  Still, women’s fashion was far more complex than the simple, broad-shouldered, box-suit style preferred by most American men of the era, and this complexity made it next to impossible to reproduce fashionable women’s wear in bulk.

  This state of affairs was obviously bound to change. The same trends that simplified women’s fashion and ushered Paul Poiret and Coco Chanel into global prominence made it possible to mass-produce women’s clothes. It was far easier to replicate a Chanel-style jersey than a Victorian-era dress, with its silk and lace flounces, its high bustle, and its layers of petticoats and supporting garments.

  It was also cheaper to produce the new styles en masse. In 1884, a typical dress required over six yards of forty-eight-inch fabric.6 By 1924, with hemlines creeping up and necklines drifting down, a standard outfit demanded just under three yards of fifty-four-inch wool.7 For the enterprising factory owner, the profit margin was too good to resist. The boom in ready-to-wear women’s clothing had arrived.

  One result was that a word that previously didn’t get much play began to creep into everyday conversation: “fashion.”

  With her discerning eye for detail and trademark wit, Lois Long helped readers of The New Yorker grasp the dynamic new cycle that came increasingly to dominate ordinary women’s lives in the Jazz Age. It began in Paris. “The winter openings of the great couturiers are over,” Long reported in August 1926, “and the American buyers, those lucky devils who get a trip to Europe for nothing, are returning to their more or less native land for a good rest in the office.”8

  Long walked her readers through the “great pomp” of the typical Paris fashion show. Beginning around nine at night, “in stream the representatives of the newspapers and magazines—modish as to their evening attire, their pearls, coiffures, and genteel voices,” and situate themselves around “a series of chastely paneled rooms, with gilt tables placed socially about, laden with bonbons and cigarettes and vases full of roses.” From nearby corridors drift the faint sounds of a jazz ensemble, barely audible over the steady hum of voices and the shuffling of handbags and click of shoes against the marble and wood floors.

  “In due course of time, when everybody is comfortable, the music softens and becomes soulful, and the first of the mannequins makes her appearance simultaneously with that of several gentlemen in livery bearing large trays of champagne, wine and cocktails.”

  With each round of drinks, the audience’s applause grows more pronounced. The models “burst through the curtains, shoulders back, swinging the hips out of line with each step,” and boldly display the next season’s wears for the throng of admiring journalists, buyers, and hangers-on. By eleven-thirty, amid a “final burst of applause, a babble of conversation, many congratulations all around, and considerable politeness being shown as to the real opinions of the guests about the excellence and significance of the presentation,” the evening was complete.

  Early the next morning, Long explained, hordes of buyers for American and British department stores assemble outside the doors of the major fashion houses and “battle madly to gain entrance, some waving cards over their heads, others hoping to bluff their way in.” By two in the afternoon, a crowd of seven hundred prospective clients is crammed into a room with only three hundred chairs. The main doors to the couture house are closed, leaving “Mr. Ginsberg, the most lavish buyer in America … left raging on the sidewalk.”

  At four o’clock, the mannequins reappear. “Bored and furious,” and looking somewhat more haggard than the night before, they mingle among the buyers and repeat “their numbers over and over again … being stopped every other step by the clutching hands of gentlemen who want to feel the goods. Nobody has yet ascertained how many telephone numbers are obtained by this simple, businesslike process.”

  Agreements are made. Deals are cut. Representatives of the major department stores scramble for the telegraph office to convey the day’s business to London and New York. “The press is reverent. Buyers are reverent. The mannequins, who understand English, become more and more annoyed as jests about their ankles, morals, and size are bandied about amidst merry laughter. And at six, everybody storms out, making appointments for final selections as he goes, and silence settles over the house, until the next day. Thus, my children, a Mode is born.”

  Actually, Lois Long, the New Yorker’s normally perceptive fashion and society columnist, just missed the mark. This was the story of how a fashion was conceived—not born.

  “Fashion does not exist until it goe
s into the streets,” Coco Chanel observed.9 “The fashion that remains in the salons has no more significance than a fashion ball.”

  Long should have deferred on this question to her friend Elizabeth Hawes. Hawes was a young expatriate who overlapped briefly with Long at Vassar College and was moonlighting as a Paris stringer for The New Yorker, covering the fashion scene on those occasions when Long (aka Lipstick) was stuck in Manhattan, tearing up the town and writing “Tables for Two.”

  Hawes also worked for Madame Doret, one of the hundreds of copy artists who supplied moderately priced replicas of Parisian couture.10 Collaborating with individual customers who could afford to buy one or two authentic dresses each season, Hawes would slip Chanel originals under her coat and dash over to Madame Doret’s workrooms, where a team of professional dressmakers worked feverishly to copy the designs. Hours later, Hawes would return the originals to their owners. In exchange for loaning Madame Doret a Chanel original, a customer would receive copies of another client’s designer goods.

  Doret’s representatives also attended the fashion shows and stealthily sketched the latest line of clothes they saw on the runway. Working behind locked bathroom doors and in dark passageways outside the main hall, they could deliver a reasonably accurate rendering of a new model within hours of its official premiere.

  Elizabeth Hawes and her associates were aiding and abetting the high-end duplication of couture. But other intermediaries quickly emerged to supply Americans with low-cost versions of Paris originals. While Madame Doret’s operatives enjoyed direct exposure to Chanel dresses and copied them faithfully to the smallest detail, a less exclusive copy house might simply replicate Doret’s replicas. Other entrepreneurs catering to women on strict budgets availed themselves of the advertising sketches in popular magazines. The end effect was a wide and swift dissemination of Parisian fashion.