Flapper

Categories: History , Nonfiction

One of the more interesting aspects of getting a bit older is watching the fashions and pop culture of your youth come back into style again—what decade are we updating now, the 1980s? (Another of the interesting aspects of getting older is that it’s okay to admit you don’t know exactly where the cutting edge finds itself these days.)

Anyway, once you’ve been around once, you recognize how cyclical pop culture is.  Read Flapper:  A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern, by Joshua Zeitz, and you’ll be amused at how familiar it all seems in our Paris Hilton–jaded, media-dominated age.

Zeitz’s book is a social history of that cultural icon whom Zeitz calls “part reality, part invention,” the post–World War I modern girl whose racy lifestyle dismayed her parents and fueled a national craze. 

Drinking, dancing, smoking, using cosmetics, and enjoying an unprecedented measure of economic and sexual independence, the flapper made the most of her brave new world.  The most famous was Zelda Fitzgerald, but young women eagerly imitated other icons like Clara Bow, Lois Long, and Louise Brooks; and even their elders began to follow the lead of Coco Chanel, whose boyish style was the antithesis of the curvy Victorian ideal.

How much were women like these the product of their age, and how much did they (or advertisers and writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald) invent it?  Zeitz takes a look at this question in an entertaining but illuminating tour through the Jazz Age.