1920s Flapper:
Young Women in a Modern World

The Vitality of "The Flapper Girl"

Flapper Style

The 1920s flapper rejected the repressed stodgy Victorian world and made the world modern and exciting.

The Twenties was a decade of individuals.

If the 1920's individuality can be summed up in one word the word is: Flappers.

In this new world expression and individuality were the most important elements of living a fulfilling and complete human life, or at least that would become the message.

Personal liberty and freedom were buzzwords for these girls. Choice was not a privilege, but a god-given right. Flappers were free to choose a career, their mate[s], their vote, their make-up, clothes, sexuality--their destiny.

1920s flapper fashions were a new-found byproduct of a changing world, with many social elements merging together all at once in the fashion and the flapper culture itself.

Coco Chanel led the charge into modernity with her stripped down dresses, women's athletic wear, heavy “masculine” fabrics, the "let go" waistline, and rising hemlines.

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Flapper Style: Lasting Social Change

Paris Hilton in Modern Flapper Style

Flapper dresses helped redefine what it meant to be a woman..


Without the influence of the flappers, celebrities like Paris Hilton would possibly never exist.

You can still see the influence of in the styles of many of Hollywood's elite.

Taken out of the steel cage of the crinoline, unbound from the corset, and unburied from their layers of petticoats, women were no longer made physically and socially helpless by the clothes they wore.

On the heels of the suffrage movement, 1920s flappers took their right to smoke, drink, drive, and screw just like men.

Flapper fashion is said to be born of chance on a cool day in France when Chanel put on an over-sized man's sweater and tied the waist with a scarf.

It's said she sold 10 of these fashion concoctions when she wore the outfit out in public, and the Chanel frock was born.

Chanel's fashion movement made women's clothes wearable, fashionable, durable, and sexy. These were dresses designed for the "New Woman" of the 1920s - the flapper.

Ironically, the flapper's individuality may have been a product of a good marketing and advertising campaign more than it was a organic social movement toward self-expression and a revolt against old-fashioned culture.

Be that as it may, 1920s flapper fashion has shaped the face of style forever.

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