Fashion/ Style Changes occurred in the city Flappers

Essay by wfan99High School, 11th gradeA+, May 2005

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In the 1920s, a new generation of woman was born who smoked, drank, danced, and voted. She cut her hair, wore make-up, and went to petting parties. She was known as the flapper. Flappers challenged all modern perceptions of what it was proper for a woman to do. Flappers also constantly challenged the old-time morals and beliefs - the largest of which comes to mind are chastity and modesty. Young women were considered easy and immodest because their skirts weren't as long and their dances were more risqué. Traditionally, women wore their hair very long, but the flapper was characterized as having a short weave or bob as they called it back then. They danced new dances like the Charleston and dressed more provocatively. This was a drastic change from the previous generation.

Men also changed their fashion style during the 1920's. Men returning from the war faced closets full of clothes from the teens, which they wore into the early 1920s.

During this time, the sacque suit was equivalent to the appropriate dress for gentlemen. With the suits, colored shirts of putty, peach, blue-gray and cedar were worn. Shaped silk ties in small geometric patterns or diagonal stripes were secured with tiepins. Black bowler hats completed the ensemble.

Entertainment- Movies/ Music

The flappers also helped spark the Jazz Age. Their favorite music to dance to was jazz. Blacks like Handy, Jelly Roll Morton, and Joseph King Oliver gave birth to it. Thousands of white customers ran to Harlem bistros such as the Cotton Club to hear Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Bessie Smith and other jazz giants. After it's birth in New Orleans in the early 1900's, artists such as Sidney Bechet and Louis Armstrong traveled to the Chicago and New York areas, where Jazz albums began to be recorded...