Twenties Fashion Essay

Submitted By sierra027
Words: 566
Pages: 3

One of the most well known things about the 20’s is its fashion. Fashion during the 1920’s, probably the most daring decade for men and woman of all classes, it reinvented the fashion world. The 1920’s saw dramatic changes in dress, was perhaps the first “modern” decade of the twentieth century in these years female freedoms took off and woman demanded functional comfortable clothes, and a freedom to do as men did. Fashion had a big impact on the culture of the 1920’s and 30’s. The styles were more based on comfort and having a fresh start after World War I. Women’s clothes became tighter and more revealing. Men’s were about being sophisticated at first but then laid back. Women took up smoking, embraced their sexuality, equality of opportunity and, therefore, freedom of clothing.

Many woman mistakenly felt that to work as successfully at a job as men did, they must appear to be masculine or, at least, un-feminine. The corseted woman of the previous decade, with her hobble skirts and huge hats, looked as if she came from another world when compared to the ‘modern’ woman of the 1920’s. Still compared to today the twenties were a kind of in between period for fashion. Fashionable 1920’s female body evolved from the elaborately trimmed dress with its high waist position and ankle length skirt at the beginning, to the simple, hardly decorated, shapeless tube with a hip level waistline and a skirt barely covering the knees at the end of the decade.

For ten years woman hid the attributes given to them by nature: breasts, sloping shoulders, small waists, and flowing hair with a major change in fashion during those years. The women’s independence movement of the 1920’s resulted in a dramatic change in dress as shown by the desire to look youthful, boyish, flat-chested, and at the same time want her independence and freedom. To assert their new-found freedom, woman’s skirts rose way up to their knees,

and their hair was cut short into a kind of boyish bob style. Woman shamelessly smoked and drank in public and went against the strict

Social status that the early 1900’s brought. The waistline of the dresses