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Baz Luhrmann — know for his vivid, colorful, theatrical films like Romeo + Juliet and Moulin Rouge — is tackling F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby next, and the female lead, Daisy Buchanan, has not been cast. More »
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To tie in with the Met's upcoming Costume Intitute show, Vogue produced an editorial (allegedly) offering modern takes on classic American fashion. Vogue calls them "historic archetypes of our national style." We call them reductive stereotypes of bygone ages. More »
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Was the flapper a proto-feminist, or a betrayer of suffragettes? Or both? Or just having fun? (Also: sound familiar?) More »
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Attention, everyone: 20th century Barnard students were loose women. Well, not really, but that seems to be the underlying message of this 1920s article about a controversial "purity survey" in a Columbia University humor magazine. Here were some of the survey's findings: 50% of the women indulged in necking, 34% "soul kissed", 49% had kissed ten different dudes, 66% were tipplers, and 32 women had been "tight." We'll leave it to you to figure out that last one. [Susie Bright's Journal] More »
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BlueStocking, a feminist online journal from Oxford that aims to "investigate the intellectual and artistic achievements of women," has an essay in their current issue making a case for the artistic importance of Zelda Fitzgerald. Mostly Zelda is thought of as F. Scott's wife, and writer Lindsey Meyers says Zelda was really "far more complex: she was also a ballerina, a painter and a writer who creatively explored her subjectivity through art." I've read a few of Zelda's essays, and while I found them to be mediocre at best, I see where one could argue for her artistic merit. Where I disagree with Meyers is in the implication that the "trap posed by the feminine ideal perhaps fueled Zelda's later madness." Zelda was not crazy because her world was sexist. Zelda was actually crazy. According to biographer Marion Meade who wrote about Zelda, Dorothy Parker, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Edna Ferber in Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin, Zelda was a diagnosed schizophrenic who at one point ate her own feces. When Zelda entered a Swiss mental hospital, Meade reports, the doctors said: More »
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We always thought the standard of beauty in the 1920s involved a waifish figure and cute-as-a-button breasts. But if this 1924 advertisement for the "Psycho-Expander" from Popular Mechanics is any indication, there was a significant subset of flapper-girls with dreams of both stardom and major rackitude. Proving that styles may change but the tits stay the same. More »
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