Under Construction Journal Issue 6.1 UNDER CONSTRUCTION JOURNAL 6.1 | Page 26

More important than the exposure of body parts, however, was the emergence of the androgynous style
which became synonymous with the flapper. Lee pays tribute to the influence of Chanel, who was inspired
by men’s clothing. As both Figure 1 and 2 reveal, ‘boyish’ figures and short hair were combined with
feminine jewellery and bold make-up. For Arnold, “the boyish silhouette spoke of adolescence, both in its
push for freedom and its ambiguous status between definitions”. Arnold’s overview in this regard thus
conceives of the flapper as a figure created by and for women in order to represent their freedom and
liberation in the modern era.
However, for contemporary feminists, the reliance on consumer culture to express and construct
a liberated identity for women becomes problematic. For Chen, when young women engage in small,
personal acts of emancipation as their only feminist act, the ‘personal is political’ mantra of second wave
feminism is reduced to simply the personal. Dow argues that if women’s liberation lies only in their
personal choices within appearance, fashion, personality etc., the “political situation of women’s
subjectification in patriarchy is now reversed” to mean that everything, including the political, is actually
personal and individual. For these authors, this personalisation is an ever-pressing issue in today’s
feminist discourse as consumer culture and neoliberalism is bound up with women’s liberation. For
Barnet-Weiser, popular feminism’s corporate-friendly attitude makes it a perfect companion for
neoliberal enterprise. Since this contemporary feminism is often most concerned with the number of
CEO’s and women film-directors, it fuels the idea that having more women within profit-making industries
equates to feminism. Furthermore, some feminists argue that, once women achieve this corporate
success, there emerges no collective direction around how to change the power structure. As a result,
these women eventually end up becoming a part of the patriarchal system, reproducing oppression,
rather than critiquing it or offering real changes.
The Self-Policing Silhouette
Another identifying feature of the flapper depicted on the cover images is the lengthening of the limbs
and elongated figure. In her approach to masculinity the flapper was not attempting to be muscular, but
youthful and slim. Hence, in France, the flapper was referred to as ‘La Garçonne’, the female boy. The
emphasis upon dieting and exercise during this period was notable as women’s clothing companies
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