SECTION 1 - STYLE AND SILHOUETTE

CHAPTER 1

THE 1920S- BRIGHT YOUNG THINGS

The silhouette of the 1920s woman is instantly recognizable. Ask someone to describe her and the ‘flapper’ will quickly come to mind, a wild party girl wearing a loose, fringed evening dress and long strands of pearls, with bobbed hair and a cloche hat completing the look. The flapper girl is certainly an important and enduring facet of the 1920s look but the classic style did not appear immediately and throughout the decade fashionable silhouettes morphed and changed to reflect the cultural developments of the time. This variety is helpful to keep in mind when we are looking to the 1920s for inspiration as specific design details from the period can be adjusted to suit your body shape, while still maintaining an overall vintage look. There was more to 1920s clothing than shift dresses and fringe!

The straighter, simplified look that we associate with the 1920s actually had its roots in the Edwardian period. The silhouette had already begun to loosen over the course of the 1910s, in part due to the new physically demanding roles filled by women during the First World War. Corsets – at least the rigid, whale-bone enforced kind, as fashion had by no means finished with the use of underwear to shape the female body – had already started to fall out of favour as freedom of movement and comfort became more of a concern to the fashionable woman.

As the decade began, dresses became loose and shift-like and the waist began to drop lower on the body, towards the hip. The general silhouette was intended to be long, lean and tubular in appearance, giving the wearer a boyish look without visible curves. These slim lines were encouraged with elasticated undergarments – the (slightly!) more comfortable successor to the corset. For the first time in history, hemlines began to creep upwards – reaching calf-length in the first half of the decade and eventually rising all the way up to the knee. Although relatively demure by today’s standards, this was a radical departure from Victorian concern over visible ankles from only a few decades earlier! Sport and leisure activities such as golfing and tennis were increasingly popular, and these energetic new pastimes required comfortable clothing that allowed for easy movement.

This simplification of the silhouette introduced ‘fashion’ to a far wider audience than ever before. In contrast to the careful fitting and complex construction of garments in previous decades, a fashionable dress now consisted of only a few pattern pieces, required simple fitting techniques, and could easily be sewn by the enterprising home seamstress in an evening. Fashion and style were now accessible, desirable, and within reach, a development that went hand in hand with the growth of the glamorous new world of Hollywood and cinema. The ‘silver screen’ offered plenty of fashionable inspiration and women could emulate the wardrobe of their favourite actress relatively easily.

Of course, while the basic silhouette was simple, the fashionable wardrobe of the 1920s was certainly not plain. A minimalistic shape allowed for a greater focus on design details at the hip, he