A flapper hangs a poster to advertise the Greenwich Village Halloween Ball. Date unspecified.Bettmann/Getty Images
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Actor James Hall playing marbles on the film lot with colleagues Louise Brooks, Nancy Phillips, Doris Hill, and Josephine Dunn. Date unspecified.Hulton Archive/Getty Images
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Norma Talmadge plays an Austrian girl in the film The Woman Disputed. 1928.Hulton Archive/Getty Images
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Colleen Moore, star of the silent screen. 1929.Margaret Chute/Getty Images
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Louise Brooks. 1927.Wikimedia Commons
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Actress Louise Brooks with her famous bobbed hairstyle. 1929.John Kobal Foundation/Getty Images
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Actress Lupe Velez bracing her hands on two low counters in Chicago, Illinois. 1929. Chicago History Museum/Getty Images
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American actresses Kathleen Clifford and Betty Compson stage a mock fight with their fur stoles. 1920.FPG/Getty Images
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Canadian actress Marie Prevost. 1920. APIC/Getty Images
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American actress Marion Davies. Date unspecified.Apic/Getty Images
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Actress Mary Brian in costume as a cigarette girl. 1928.Eugene Robert Richee/Margaret Chute/Getty Images
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Actress Mary Nolan as she appeared in Shanghai Lady in typical flapper fashion. Circa 1929.Bettmann/Getty Images
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Girl in flapper garb. Moscow, Idaho. 1922.Wikimedia Commons
Hollywood film star Clara Bow in a shiny strapless dress. 1926.Eugene Robert Richee/John Kobal Foundation/Getty Image
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Hollywood actress Evelyn Brent with her collection of shoes. 1925.C. E. Day/Margaret Chute/Getty Images
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Swimming suit-clad flapper strikes a pose on a breakwater. 1925. Kirn Vintage Stock/Corbis via Getty Images
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Actress Dorothy Mackaill stars in the film
The Whip. 1928.Hulton Archive/Getty Images
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American actress Viola Dana. 1924. APIC/Getty Images
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A flapper plays her banjo in the front yard. 1925. Kirn Vintage Stock/Corbis via Getty Images
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Actress Alice White. 1929.Hulton Archive/Getty Images
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Anita Page wearing a slinky dress and a sultry smile. 1928.General Photographic Agency/Getty Images
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Singer, dancer and entertainer Josephine Baker wearing a dress decorated with feathers. 1930. General Photographic Agency/Getty Images
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Gabrielle Chanel, known as Coco, the French couturier. 1932.Evening Standard/Getty Images
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Hollywood film star Dorothy Sebastian checks the time on a small jade watch worn on a gold and jade chain around her neck. 1925. Clarence Sinclair Bull/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
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Canadian actress Fay Wray. 1925.Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images
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A flapper poses with her car. 1925. Kirn Vintage Stock/Corbis via Getty Images
Jean Arthur, the stage name of Gladys Greene, doing her impression of Spain's original flapper, Carmen. 1929.Eugene Robert Richee/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
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Actress Lila Lee roller skates with a sail in Hollywood. Date unspecified. Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images
“The Modern Young Girl Is A Delight”: Flapper Fashion Of The Jazz Age
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The etymology of the word "flapper" in reference to an audacious and fashionable lady of the 1920s is unclear. Flapper meant "young wild-duck or partridge" in the mid-16th century, and one could conceivably draw comparisons between wild young fowl and green-but-game girls flapping their limbs and flaunting their fashion as they flirted and danced the Charleston.
But while we aren't clear where the word "flapper," in its 1920s context, came from, we do know that those who wore the epithet proudly made a clear impact on pop culture -- particularly when it came to flapper fashion.
Flappers embraced their fleeting post-World War I freedom from existential dread and their liberating post-Victorian freedom from constrictive corsetry and flaunted the luxurious designs of the day.
The reaction to this new type of woman was mixed, according to Margaret O'Leary, writing in the New York Times in 1922:
"Roughly, the world is divided into those who delight in her, those who fear her, and those who try pathetically to take her as a matter of course. Optimists have called her the hope of a new era, pessimists point to her as ultimate evidence of the decadence of the old."
Among those optimists was Virginia Potter, President of the New York League of Girls Clubs, Inc., who saw flappers as revolutionaries:
"I think the modern young girl is a delight. She dresses simply and sensibly, and she looks life right in the eye; she knows just what she wants and goes after it, whether it is a man, a career, a job, or a new hat."
To Potter, flappers replaced the typical "mid-Victorian clinging vine" debutantes sheltered by their mothers with a new era wielding "more sense than [their] grandmother[s] had when they were young" — particularly when it came to fashion.
The photos above don't address the mores or politics of the flapper, but they do serve as a splendid portfolio of flapper fashion, where masculine cuts mingled with feminine furs, fresh bobs ("the badge of flapperhood") framed powdered and painted faces and exposed necks and necklines while silhouettes widened to accommodate life in an energetic age of emancipation.
Kellen Perry is a veteran writer on topics including television, history, music, art, video games, and food. His work has also appeared on Grunge, Ranker, and Looper.
John Kuroski is the editorial director of All That's Interesting. He graduated from New York University with a degree in history, earning a place in the Phi Alpha Theta honor society for history students. An editor at All That's Interesting since 2015, his areas of interest include modern history and true crime.
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Perry, Kellen. "“The Modern Young Girl Is A Delight”: Flapper Fashion Of The Jazz Age." AllThatsInteresting.com, July 11, 2017, https://allthatsinteresting.com/flapper-fashion. Accessed December 14, 2024.
