The Flapper Myth: How 1920s Fashion Freed Women - and Trapped Them
When you hear “the 1920s,” you think flapper, right? Fringes, beads, fancy headbands - like in Baz Luhrmann's 2013 The Great Gatsby.
But that whole look—the really short sparkly dress—is essentially a Halloween costume, not fashion history. Today I want to look past the myth of the flapper - not just at what women wore, but at what it all meant. Because the 1920s fashion revolution gave women freedom... and trapped them in ways we're still dealing with today.
The fashion transformation of between 1900 and 1930 was extraordinary. Think about it—around 1900, you would be wearing ankle-length skirts and you might have seventeen layers, with shifts, corsets, corset covers, petticoats, etcetera. Then in the 1920s? Suddenly it was maybe four garments in total. If someone would appear on the street in a Gilded Age outfit, we'd stare because they'd stand out. A 1920s outfit? We wouldn't necessarily notice because the 1920s was really the first modern decade, when the foundation for western fashion as we know it today was pretty much invented. In fact, the change in women's clothing between 1900 and 1925 was probably greater than the change between 1925 and 2025.
It boggles the mind, right? But it's essentially true. And when you realize that, you also realize the huge generational gap between the Old Victorians, who were still very much alive and in many cases, very much in charge, and the youngsters who viewed short skirts, telephones, and fast(ish) cars as natural.
But all that's for later. Now, let's look at some of the foundational facts about 1920s fashion.
First of all—the silhouette. Nothing says 1920s as much as the slim, straight, boyish silhouette with a dropped waist. It's the iconic 1920s look, and it screams modernity. It roars: "FEMALE EMANCIPATION!"
Because the 1920s was when women finally started coming into their own. In most of the world, female suffrage was a 1920s invention. In America, it was through the 19th Amendment in 1920, while in the UK women had to wait until 1928 to get the vote on the same terms as men. At the same time, the 1920s also saw women fully allowed into the workforce, with many jobs that had previously been closed to them getting more accessible. And with money of their own, women became a consumer force to be reckoned with.
So the freedom of the transition from boned corsets to corselettes with elastic panels over the course of the decade must be seen as part of that liberation. No longer did women wear layer upon layer of undergarments, and the voluminous cotton underpants of previous years were replaced with bloomers and combination chemises in thin silk and rayon, a new invention also known as artificial silk.
Or in theory that's what happened, anyway, because lots of women in the 1920s were not young, glamorous flappers, but old, staid matrons who stuck to what they were used to, thank you very much.
But no one escaped the shorter skirts. Hemlines had started to creep up even before the 1920s, and in the first years of the decade, they still hovered just above the ankles, slowly creeping up to mid-shin. Then in 1923-24, hemlines dropped slightly again, only to start to really climb up in 1925, until they stayed right at the knee during 1926-28.
I love early 1920s pictures of ordinary women, because you can really see how they carry themselves differently than they did only a few years later. Their feet are placed more sturdily apart, as I imagine they stood in long skirts when and their legs weren't visible. The coy, elegant draping of legs only appears over the course of the decade, and again, it's slowest in older and lower-class women. There is something about how in those photos they inhabit their bodies with much less awareness than women did in later decades that really makes you think.
And that brings me to the dark side of the new slim column silhouette. Previously, women's bodies had been pinched and squeezed and padded with the help of corsets and bust improvers. But in the 1920s, women's bodies were suddenly "free." Or rather, women were suddenly expected to achieve the ideal silhouette without help. Which was great if that was how you naturally looked, but lots of women didn't. Lots of women had hips and ample bosoms and jiggle.
It triggered a dieting mania. Because when women's bodies weren't policed by exterior factors like corsets anymore, women were pushed to police their own bodies to unprecedented degrees. It created great opportunities to sell the newly fledged female consumers all kinds of things: elastic belts, exercise machines, and diet pills. Even cigarettes were sold with dieting in mind: “Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet.”
But some women were doomed by T&A to never achieve the ideal shape, leading to much squeezing into tight corsetry and illusions meant to slim and elongate the body, such as vertical pintucks, stripes, and rows of buttons.
Even so, most women were thrilled with the newfound freedom of movement, and the much less demanding wardrobe. Not only were there fewer fussy frills and laces, not to mention starching, overall, but fabrics such as rayon and jersey were revolutionary both in comfort and ease of care. And suddenly active women were allowed to wear sportswear that was more about allowing them freedom to actually exercise the sports they were taking part in, and less about looking like an ideal woman (you know, very mindful and VERY demure).
Another revolution was haircare. Victorian and Edwardian women took pride in their long hair, which was cumbersome to wash and sometimes rather heavy to wear up all day. Lots of women in the 1920s kept their long hair, of course, but it gradually became more and more acceptable to cut it off into a short bob. Early in the decade, the bob was often curly and voluminous, but in the later half, sleek, marcelled waves were very much the norm. Most scandalous of all was the Eton crop, a very short hairstyle inspired by how schoolboys wore their hair. You can only imagine the exhilaration women must have felt at suddenly enjoying the same freedom and ease of care men did: a quick trim and a comb, and you were ready to go.
After you pulled on your cloche hat, though, of course, because women still did not go out with their heads uncovered. It might feel strange today, but in the 1920s walking around bare-headed outside was like us going to the store story in our pajamas—sure to get disapproving stares. Cloche hats—the close-fitting, bell-shaped hats we primarily associate with the 1920s—were very popular but by no means the only kind worn. Early in the decade, large "picture hats" were very popular, and throughout the decade wide-brimmed hats appeared, especially in the summer. A wide brim is simply much better at providing shade!
But all of these clothes, from the drop-waisted wasted dresses to the cloches, were much simpler and cheaper to produce than the voluminous skirts and heavily decorated hats of earlier decades. Suddenly fashion could be mass-produced and sold ready-made, allowing for less affluent women to enjoy fashion to a degree they couldn't before. And in order to run up a simple but fashionable dress, you barely even needed skills or time. The ever-popular "handkerchief dress" or the infamous "one-hour-dress" can be run up by almost anyone with a sewing machine in the time it takes to bake a cake (I can attest to this myself).
And that in turn created anxieties. When class markers are less obvious and populations become more urban, it becomes less easy to sort out where on the social scale people belong, and that always creates anxieties, especially in the upper echelons. If Mary the Shopgirl can run up a copy of your Parisian frock on her Sunday afternoon off, then how can you know who you are dealing with? There's jewelry, of course, but with the increasing popularity of costume jewelry, that also became harder to use as a reliable gauge. Luckily, fur could still not be reproduced cheaply, so your silver fox or mink collar would still be used to broadcast that you were, in fact, the real thing (or The Real McCoy, to use a 1920s expression that was actually based off the name of an infamous rum runner).
This ability for ordinary women to adopt the high fashion silhouette was a profound shift that didn't just blur class lines, but helped shape the modern middle-class identity. And in that lay another trap: if you can keep up with the Joneses, then keeping up becomes almost an obsession—and an obsession that fuelled increased consumption: dresses, lipstick, face powder, and stockings, as well as cars, radios, iceboxes, and washing machines.
So while 1920s fashion was fun and freeing, it also begs the question: how much of that feeling of fashion equality was genuine liberation, and how much was just the start of the consumer engine needing everyone to keep consuming clothes?
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Liv Ericson writes bootlegger romances set in 1920s America. When she's not researching Prohibition-era cocktails or vintage fashion, she's crafting stories about gangsters, speakeasies, and the women who love them. Sign up for her newsletter to get The Bootlegger's Little Book of Cocktails and updates on new releases.