The 1920’s

The Jazz AgeFashion, Music, and Flappers

What is a “flapper?”• “New breed" of young women

– wore short skirts, bobbed their hair, listened to the new jazz music, and flaunted their disdain for what was then considered acceptable behavior.

– Flappers were seen as brash for wearing excessive makeup, drinking, treating sex in a casual manner, smoking, driving automobiles and otherwise flouting social and sexual norms.

• Flappers had their origins in the period of liberalism, social and political turbulence and increased transatlantic cultural exchange that followed the end of the First World War, as well as the export of American jazz culture to Europe.

What is a “flapper?”• “I think a woman gets more happiness out of being gay, light-hearted, unconventional,

mistress of her own fate.... I want [my daughter] to be a flapper, because flappers are brave and gay and beautiful.” Author Zelda Fitzgerald.1925

• “She is frankly, heavily made up... pallor mortis, poisonously scarlet lips, richly ringed eyes.... And there are, finally, her clothes.... Her dress... is cut low where it might be high, and vice versa. The skirt comes just an inch below her knees, overlapping by a faint fraction her rolled and twisted stockings. The idea is that when she walks in a bit of a breeze, you shall now and then observe the knee.... [The flapper’s] haircut is also abbreviated. She wears of course the newest thing in bobs.” Bruce Bliven, “Flapper Jane,” The New Republic, (Sept. 9, 1925).

Zelda FitzgeraldThe Ultimate Flapper

Zelda Fitzgerald

• Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald was the muse of the Jazz Age.

• She was the embodiment of all things modern and new, the prototype for every flapper to follow.

• She described herself as “without a thought for anyone else…I did not have a single feeling of inferiority, or shyness, or doubt, and no moral principles.”

Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald• “Don’t you think I was made for you? I feel like you had me ordered – and I was

delivered to you – to be worn – I want you to wear me like a watch-chain or button-hole bouquet-to the world.”

• Reflecting on their relationship in later years, Scott wrote, “I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity and her flaming self-respect and it’s these things I’d believe in even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasn’t all that she should be…I love her and that’s the beginning and the end of it.”

• At the end of the Jazz Age, Scott wrote, “Sometimes I don’t know whether Zelda and I are real or whether we are characters in one of my novels.”

Early 1920s Day Wear

Early 1920s Evening Wear

Jazz Music

• Louis Armstrong: "Jazz is music that's never played the same way once."

• Ralph Ellison: "Jazz is an art of individual assertion within and against the group...”

• Art Blakey: "No America, no jazz. I’ve seen people try to connect it to other countries, for instance to Africa, but it doesn’t have a damn thing to do with Africa".[

Jazz

• African roots in spirituals• Blues 12 bar structure– Example

• Improvisation– Never played the same way twice– Equal weight on composer and performer

Ella Fitzgerald & Duke Ellington“Imagine My Frustration”

The Basque Dress

The One Hour Dress

The Flapper Dress

Billie Holiday

The Quintessential Flapper Dress

The Flapper BobLouise Brooks

Duke Ellington“Take the A Train”

Louise Brooks“Day Wear”

Evening WearLouise Brooks

Thelonius Monk“Blue Monk”