The Beginning

20s and Flapper Dress http://tribute2couture.livejournal.com/

"The costume history image in our minds of a woman of the 'Roaring Twenties' is actually likely to be the image of a flapper. Flappers did not truly emerge until 1926. Flapper fashion embraced all things and styles modern. A fashionable flapper had short sleek hair, a shorter than average shapeless shift dress, a chest as flat as a board, wore make up and applied it in public, smoked with a long cigarette holder, exposed her limbs and epitomised the spirit of a reckless rebel who danced the nights away in the Jazz Age.

The French called the flapper fashion style the 'garconne'. High fashion until the twenties had been for the richer women of society. But because construction of the flapper's dress was less complicated than earlier fashions, women were much more successful at home dressmaking a flapper dress which was a straight shift. The really rich still continued to wear beautifully embellished silk garments for evening, but the masses revelled in their new found sophistication of very fashionable flapper clothes. Skirts only revealed the knee briefly between 1926 and 1928, and this was the only period when evening dresses were short in line with day dress lengths. This was the flapper period."