1920s – THE FLAPPER
he flapper dresses of the 1920s were shorter, lighter and way more fun to wear than any of the garms donned by women in decades past. That’s because they populated an era that was “bookended by despair”, explains Charlotte Dallison, author of . “It was quite a fraught time. There was World War I, which ended in 1918, and the stock market crash was on the horizon,” she says. War, plus the nasty Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-19, gave folks a good reason to party during the ’20s. “It was a reaction which ran deeper than gin cocktails,” Charlotte says. The sense of freedom felt in the ’20s was also felt around women’s waists. The corset was finally ‘out’, and glitzy, free-moving fabric that bounced around women’s dancing bodies was ‘in’. “The figure that was fashionable and aspirational was that slim, boyish, quite flat-chested figure, which had never really been a fashionable look up until then,” Charlotte says. “Also, people were really sick, because they’d been starving for four years. So it was a combination of darkness and lightness which created this look.” Beyond the world of groundbreaking
