Aging flappers?

[igenlode.livejournal.com]

I've wondered for a while...

You know how women tended to follow the latest fashions for a while, then in middle age to settle on the current 'look' and stay more or less consistent in that to the end of their lives? (So elderly women in the 1920s would still be around in 19th-century fashions, sitting in their bonnets and bustles and whatever -- and there was a population of aging mini-skirt wearers in the 1980s who'd never really shaken off the Sixties...)

Given that the 'flapper' look was so very much a youthful one, I wondered if there was a conservative section of women who did stick with it after fashions changed, or if it was just too obviously unsuited to older women. (You can see in silent films that middle-aged women did take up the tube-dress look when it was fashionable -- and you can see what the results looked like on outsize figures, too...)

Or would the upheaval of a second World War have effectively killed off the remnants of an earlier era, anyway?

Comments

Flappers

[infrogmation.livejournal.com]

My grandmother was a teenager in the '20s, and certainly wore the "flapper" fashions at the time. She tried to keep up to date at least through the '60s, and in her later life was embarassed about the flapper era.

That was the example of one person. A counter example is I remember it was not uncommon to see a fair number of older women wearing cloche hats and roughly mid-20s length dresses into the '80s here in New Orleans; if anything it seemed more common with African American than White women.

Re: Flappers

[infrogmation.livejournal.com]

My isolated personal family example:



1929



Same woman, 1967

[hazeltea.livejournal.com]

My maternal grandmother was a flapper (born 1900) She always liked the style, and was drawn to art noveau things. However, I think that during WWII, you wore what you could get your hands on! She did sew, though, and kept some of the style in her taste.

In later life, she wore fashions up to the 50's styles, I think. I know she never wore trousers of any kind, only skirts and dresses. She didn't think it was proper. My mother kept trying to convert her to the wonders of pants, without success.

This is a picture of what she chose to wear to my mother's wedding in 1960. She wore her 1930s fur over it.

(http://www.flickr.com/photos/madlovescience/3357091919/)

and the fur

(http://www.flickr.com/photos/madlovescience/3357204019/)

I don't have her 1920s pictures scanned, sorry!

My paternal grandmother, on the right, was born in 1916, and I remember her in stylish 50s clothes for the rest of her life. I think she was keen on keeping up the fashions until then. My mom did convert her to trousers (she was nothing if not full of common sense), but she continued wearing 50s jewelry and makeup, cat's eye sunglasses, and headscarves over her curls. to quote my mom, "she thought she was Lucy!" LOL

[frou-frou.livejournal.com]

I agree that people's style does tend to by heavily influenced by what they wore at a certain time in their life, but you have to consider a couple of things:

Firstly that people (assuming their figure stayed the same) generally keep their clothes for up to 20 years, after that they're likely to be too shabby unless they were worn infrequently, or their needs will have changed. So you get old ladies dressing in Edwardian style in the '20s but wearing bustles is unlikely as they're just too old, and too far out of fashion.

Secondly, during the Great Depression and WW2 there were shortages (firstly of money and secondly of materials) and so many earlier styles were updated. It's natural for people to wear different things at different times of their lives as their needs change.

Whilst we will favour certain stylings, they will still move with the times - hence the lady in the photos below who is wearing '20s styling in both pics, but the '60s were heavily influenced by '20s styling anyway. I think she looks great!

[igenlode.livejournal.com]

Thanks for your thoughts (and pictures!)

One thing I'd forgotten is that I've read, in relation to costuming "Boardwalk Empire", that the poor would usually appear about ten years behind the 'current' fashions -- either because they had lost their money and couldn't afford to keep buying new clothes, or because the second-hand clothes they were buying were other people's cast-off and out of fashion items. But then also they probably wouldn't be wearing the (impractical) extremes of fashion in the first place...
(I thought this was going to be relevant when it first occurred to me but I'm not sure it is -- oops!)

Thinking about the Edwardian old ladies and clothes wearing out after twenty years... I have to say I find it hard, psychologically speaking, to imagine conservative women of that generation suddenly modernising a style they might have worn for forty years simply because their clothes were wearing out. At least among the upper classes, I think you could probably go on getting clothes in whatever style you cared to order, since it would be a question of making a call to one's dressmaker rather than of being obliged to buy off-the-peg.

I'm still trying to think of visual examples (films/photos) of the flapper style showing up in the 30s/40s but I can't call any to mind -- it really seems to have disappeared quite quickly.

[lacehearts89.livejournal.com]

Well, my Mum use to work at the Eaton's department store in Winnipeg during the 70s, and she said that she remembered these two particular sisters that use to come in. She described them as wearing clothing that was "in" but reminiscent of their younger days. They usually bought perfume from my Mum, but occasionally they'd buy dark red or orange lipsticks.
She said that they would do their hair (which they dyed a sort of blue-ish hue) to hide their brows (as they probably didn't have any) a lot of the girls in the department would say that they looked like caricatures but use to wonder what they looked like when they were younger, as you could tell that they must have been very striking when they were younger.