Flapper Culture & Style                                                                   BACK TO HOME PAGE

                                          "They're all desperadoes, these kids, all of them with any life in their veins; the girls as
                                          well as the boys; maybe more than the boys."

                                                                                  --- from "Flaming Youth," by Warner Fabian

                                              The flapper, whose antics were immortalized in the cartoons of John Held Jr., was the heroine
                                  of the Jazz Age. With short hair and a short skirt, with turned-down hose and powdered knees - the
                                  flapper must have seemed to her mother (the gentle Gibson girl of an earlier generation) like a rebel.

No longer confined to home and tradition, the typical flapper was a young women who was often
  thought of as a little fast and maybe even a little brazen. Mostly, the flapper offended the older
  generation because she defied conventions of acceptable feminine behavior. The flapper was
  "modern." Traditionally, women's hair had always been worn long. The flapper wore it short, or
   bobbed. She used make-up (which she might well apply in public). And the flapper wore baggy
   dresses which often exposed her arms as well as her legs from the knees down. However, flappers
   did more than symbolize a revolution in fashion and mores - they embodied the modern spirit of the Jazz Age.
 

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