them. In their movies, they portrayed rebellious, independent young women, who were active, drove cars, dated, and changed the expectations of women. One film, in particular, became the mirror for how American society looked at itself: 1927's It, staring Clara Bow,
introducing the notion that sex meant having a good time too, which was the last blow to the previous Victorian morals.
Movies were a favorite pastime, and in the Twenties, it grew to become a very lucrative business. Palatial movie theaters were being built everywhere. The advent of Technicolor, and the first film using this process, Toll of the Sea (1922) starring Anna May Wong, and The Black Pirate (1926) starring and produced by Douglas Fairbanks, as well as the arrival of sound with Warner Brothers’ first movie with a soundtrack Don Juan in 1926, followed by the first Part-Talkie, The Jazz Singer, in 1927, paved the road to the film industry of today. Likewise, television made its first appearance. John Logie Baird invented the first working mechanical television system in 1925, and in 1928, he invented and demonstrated the first color television.
Literature in the U.S. influenced the popularity of the Flapper image with writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Anita Loos. Fitzgerald would remain one of the most remembered authors for capturing the spirit of the Roaring 20’s, its youthful love affairs, and describing post-World War I life and petting parties. Known to be a sociable and attractive man, Fitzgerald found fame after the publication of his first novel, This Side of Paradise, in 1920. Soon, he and his beautiful but emotionally unstable wife, Zelda, were regarded as the epitome of the spirit of the period. Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel, The Great Gatsby about a mysterious millionaire, Jay Gatsby, and his passion and obsession for the beautiful Daisy Buchanan, is considered the work of literacy that best explores the themes of decadence, idealism, social upheaval and excess, creating the ultimate portrait of the Jazz Age and the Roaring Twenties.
To the same extent, John Held Jr., Ethel Hays and Faith Burrows promoted the Flapper look and lifestyle through their works, as Flappers came to be seen as attractive, reckless and independent. The fashion craze had also its detractors and critics in Dorothy Parker, who penned “Flappers: A Hate Song” making fun of the fad. A Harvard psychologist even reported that Flappers had “the lowest degree of intelligence” and constituted “a hopeless problem for educators.” No matter one’s position, the social exuberance and turmoil of the era and the advent of “The Machine” were conducive to new artistic tendencies.
After WWI, the French Art Deco crossed the Atlantic and flourished in the U.S. beginning with the Twenties. Its eclectic style combined bold geometric shapes and lavish ornamentation with Machine Age imagery, well depicted in Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent film, Metropolis.
Other cultural movements emerged such as Surrealism and Expressionism, but one group that carried the disillusionment of the entire generation was The Lost Generation, a name originally given by Gertrude Stein, though popularized by Ernest Hemingway as an epigraph in one of his novels, The Sun Also Rises, in 1926. The group included American writers, poets, and artists such as Cole Porter, Gerald Murphy, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zelda Fitzgerald, and Ezra Pound, among others. Still they could not foresee the upcoming of the Great Depression which marked the end of the Roaring Twenties when the stock market crashed on October 24, 1929.
Literature & Art
Joan Crawford models a flapper dress.
20 | Ceres Magazine | Oct/Nov 2015
Billie Dove on "Not for Old Fogies", The Flapper (cover), November 1922.