Short Stuff: Flappers

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Hey, and welcome to the shorts that fun Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here doing the Charleston on Dave's behalf. And this is step, you should know short stuff. Let's go. Now. All right, Their is 1915, everybody. And the word flapper is about to be introduced to the world by way of H.L. Minkin, a writer who wrote a, I guess, an essay called the flapper for the literary magazine, The Smart Set.

Great, man. Yeah. By the way, we should say that private eye is not a rag over in the UK. So sorry, everybody. I'm going to go ahead and assume the smart set wasn't either, but in this, in this article or essay, making is using a term that's already been established flapper.

“It was, I think, British slang for a young girl, right?”

He's saying, no, no, no. We need to get more specific. There's a young girl that's emerging. They're not here yet, but I can see them coming out of the fabric of culture. And they are not going to follow these standards and traditions and moral codes that are handed down generation after generation. There's this new thing called media that is coming up and fats what's going to influence them and they're going to be total trailblazers.

And he was right. Yeah, so the flapper would come along and kick what was known as the Gibson Girl to the curb. The Gibson Girl during the 1910s was created and popularized from an illustrator named Charles Dana Gibson. And this was like, if you think of the Edwardian sort of corset wearing up-do hair, wearing choker, you know, like dress that goes, the skirt that goes all the way to the past the ankle and then like a choker up to under the chin. That's the Gibson Girl look and the flapper came along and said, no, no, no, we want to have more fun than that.

They did and they did and it took the death of tens of millions of people to get them there because World War I and the 1918 flu pandemic were at one to punch that killed a lot of people around the world. And in doing so, both of those things adjusted gender norms to the extent that all of a sudden like the world couldn't afford to just keep women off to the side any longer. They, they were needed more than ever, like in the workforce, they needed to be educated. So it opened all these opportunities for women to just kind of come out from under the thumb of their fathers and then their husbands.

Yeah, and this kind of happened around 1920 when the roaring 20s came on the scene, that was a new woman emerging from the cocoon that kind of coincided with like, hey, we'd like to have a right to vote.

“Kind of early feminist causes as well. And both the 18th and 19th amendments were both, you know, pretty crucial to the rise of this new kind of style of woman, which was a prohibition, which sent people into underground bars hanging out.”

And then the right to vote. And both of these things were sort of like a rejection of the Victorian code that came before. Big time. I mean, this wasn't like a transition over, you know, the course of decades that just one piece followed another. This was like a razor blade cutting off the old garden starting a new and it was this it was led by this this leading edge of the young like early 20s late teens girls who just completely just changed everything.

They started wearing makeup women did not wear makeup unless you were a sex worker or an actress. They just did all the stuff that up to that point was just not done and they just started doing it all of a sudden. Yeah, two other big things that kind of spurred this was the rise of the automobile.

“More and more people had cars, so all of a sudden not only could young women like drive themselves places and they weren't literally sort of underlocking key of their their home or their parents homes.”

But all of a sudden boys and young men could come along and pick them up and take them out on a date and you know sometimes things would happen in cars and like everything was changing. The other big one was the radio KDK and Pittsburgh was the first I guess commercial broadcast station and by 1924 there were more than 600 of those. And all of a sudden there was like music happening and movies happening that featured different styles and young women like you know dancing and having fun.

Yeah, people driving around in convertibles in New York booming jz it was amazing.

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Also, before we get started again, I want to shout out Conger for writing this. This is a Conger joint from House of Works, this article was. That's right. Go check out on Ladylike, the podcast. It's great and so is Kristen. Exactly. So there was a new woman that emerged from that right about. You can kind of say that those two amendments that came out so quickly together, the 18th and 19th.

One was for the flappers. That was the prohibition on alcohol because it created "Speakeys," like you said. The right to vote that created this kind of other thread of women called the new woman who were very interested in being active politically and socially. The flappers were like, yeah, you go have fun with that. We're going to go get wasted and hang out and speak easy in New York and just live our funous lives. Yeah, or maybe go see a Clara Bow movie because in 1922 Clara Bow debuted and beyond the rainbow.

And it's kind of defined the flapper look. She had that hair bob. She had a little bit of makeup on. She said that the flapper style was really coming in Vogue in real life. You had none other than Zelda Fitzgerald as a late teen when she was with F Scott Fitzgerald when he first gained fame.

Yeah, also I don't know who I said was the first it girl, but I was wrong. It was in some other podcast a lot of that.

But I whoever it was was in like the 40s or 50s, but it sounds familiar. Clara Bow is the actual first it girl. Okay, and then I guess Zelda Fitzgerald was the first real life it girl. But let's talk about some of those fashions that people at Claire Bow and Zelda Fitzgerald rocked. A lot of it was being designed by Coco Chanel.

Yeah, the real deal Coco Chanel was designing in Paris during this time. The whole Victorian era course at S figure shape was just thrown totally out the window.

And instead it was boyish bodies with drapy, boxy skirts essentially.

Yeah, that was like that sack dress was like the flapper uniform. The fabric literally was lighter. Connor found this is pretty staggering, but the flapper dress had about seven yards of fabric. A Victorian gown had about 20 yards of fabric. So they literally shed weight in their clothing to just be freer.

The flapper dress basically was about mid-calf and length by the late 1920s it inched above the knee a little bit. But you know, so they could dance so they could do the Charleston and the Fox Trot. Yeah, people think like it immediately went up. That is actually one thing that kind of slowly changed and it was just that way for a couple of years. One of the other things that is like like you said the flapper uniform was the close hat.

I never knew that's what it was called.

But it's like a almost brimless hat. It's very close to the head usually as a big bow and it would show off to their hairdo, which was usually quite short. You mentioned that those Gibson girls had like the big updue or else like long, flowy hair. Another way to rebel against that was to cut your hair very short and often very straight and sometimes with pomade.

“That was that was the flapper girls haircut. I think it was called the Eton crop.”

Yeah, and they might use the pomade to like slick it back, like a man might. They would show there a lot of those flapper dresses had no arms, so they were showing their arms for the first time. It's scandalous. Very scandalous. A lot of times with a lot of like necklaces and bracelets and things like that. And the wool, those like heavy black wool stockings went out of fashion for a more sheer hosery.

And sometimes they would roll down that hosery a little bit to like a makeshift knee high. Not a good look. Oh, I think it is. Do you like the rolled down knee high look? Yeah, I was raised back to all that stuff. It's very titillating.

“I think my problem is I associate that with mama for mama's family.”

Yeah, that'll do it. Yeah, that'll definitely dampen your thoughts. So all of this flapper party came and went in less than a decade. I mean, Claire Boe hit the scene in 1922. And she was the one and beyond the rainbow that really like kind of set the standard. And by 1929 it was all over because the depression hit and everybody's like we don't have time for parties anymore.

We got bigger fish to fry now. Yeah, and that was kind of it. The stock market crash was like literally the very end. It was October 29, 1929. And it was just one of those events that kind of kind of signified like the end of an era and definitely the end of the flapper era. Yeah, the fun was over.

And so it was prohibition too because America really needed to start drinking again so that they're went to speak easy and all that stuff.

“And I think that means short stuff so we're too though, right?”

Yeah, it's not just over Chuck, it's out. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts to my heart radio visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.