Aging flappers?
Jul. 3rd, 2011 12:37 am![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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theflappersI'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?
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?
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Date: 2011-07-20 11:34 pm (UTC)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.