FASHION 1916-1922

I was going to quit talking about fashion for a while but Jenny Lerew challenged me to defend my proposition that late teens and early twenties fashions sucked and I couldn't resist taking her up on it. Here's the evidence, culled from period sources.

Everybody thinks of the 1920s as the flapper decade, forgetting that before the short-skirted flapper was the long-skirted, shapeless, deco, melting dowager style. In the teens there was a transitional stage to deco which attempted to keep the older, Gibson Girl style and modify it to fit the new sensibility. You can see this transitional style in the 1917 newsreel above.


Eventually the modified Gibson dress was thrown out in favor of the entirely new, but even worse deco style. It's hard to imagine that royalty (above) could have had such bad taste. The dress adds 20 years to the age of the poor princess wearing it.

The top of this dress (above) is plain but not horrible, but what about the corn husk bottom?

The loose, shapeless dress above is made even worse by the low waist line.

Here (above) is woman as a kind of long candy bar or TV remote.

Here's (white dress, above) a "Dr. Giggles"-style nurses uniform adapted to street wear.

Here's (above) a Margaret Dumont-style dress emphasizing the flat chest. Bras were a new invention in those days and they were used for flattening, not uplifting. As the 20s wore on the flappers would keep the flat chest, shorten the hem and give women German army helmets but that's a post for another day.