Flapper (30 page)

All of this had changed by the 1920s. People had better ways of examining themselves and those around them. The wall-to-wall mirrors in the department store (damning in their accuracy), the little girl on the street clutching a Kodak camera in her hand, the shiny, reflective storefront windows, the stranger on the commuter train with the suspicious gaze—each was quietly poised to sear an unflattering image into memory.

As advertisers encouraged the American consumer to take greater stock of his or her appearance—to ratchet up standards of cleanliness, grooming, and artificial enhancement, to abandon the Sunday bath for the daily shower, to sculpt one’s features in the never-ending quest for eternal youth and perfection—old taboos against lipstick, mascara, rouge, and face powder gave way to a new imperative: self-improvement.

In the nineteenth century, the only women who dared wear makeup were stage actresses, whose morals were considered highly suspect, and prostitutes. Miners in western camps warned that

Hangtown Gals are plump and rosy,
Hair in ringlets mighty cosy.
¹⁷
Painted cheeks and gassy bonnets;
Touch them and they’ll sting like hornets.

Popular convention held that makeup concealed one’s inner spirit. And who but a guilty or scheming person would mask his or her true nature? In an era when cities were first starting to expand and where people were being thrown for the first time into a sea of anonymous faces, the dominant culture placed a high premium on “a perfectly transparent character.”
¹⁸
Moralists held that, for women especially, “the skin’s power of expression” was a vital sign of one’s innate spirit and integrity.
¹⁹
Thus, women who “painted” their faces had something to hide, just as young ladies who “put on the tinsel”—fancy clothes, flashy adornments, nail polish—were playing a dangerous game, trying “to
seem
to be what they are not.”

“The mask of fashion,” as critics sometimes called it, was turning everyday life into a “masquerade, in which we dress ourselves in the finest fashions of society, use a language suited to the characters we assume;—with smiling faces, mask aching hearts; address accents of kindness to our enemies, and often those of coldness to our friends.
²⁰
The part once assumed must be acted out, no matter at what expense of truth and feeling.”

By the 1920s, popular opinion had completed a 180-degree shift. Now accustomed to the anonymity of the modern world, public authorities—more likely to be advertisers than ministers
—encouraged
Americans to cultivate their exterior appearance and present as polished a facade as possible. Cosmetics companies like Armand even urged the New Woman to “Find Yourself” through the application of makeup. “The questions and answers will discover the real you—not as you think you are—but as others see you.”
²¹
What was once dismissed as “the mask of fashion” now held out the power to “make
us look and feel more self-possessed, poised, and efficient.” Self-invention was a right; self-reinvention was a necessity.

When a woman “begins to regard her appearance in her own mind as a fixed, unalterable quality,” warned
Vogue’s Book of Beauty
, “—that same moment, some vital, shining part of her is extinguished forever.”
²²
Drawing on popular psychoanalytic argot,
Vogue
’s editors found that an inattention to external appearance “destroys those potential personalities that psychologists tell us are lurking behind our ordinary selves.”

Whereas Victorian moralists claimed that the use of makeup and a slavish attention to fashion somehow masked one’s inner self, the new apostles of consumerism claimed that lipstick and nice clothes empowered the superwoman beneath the skin. When a distraught woman from Detroit wrote to “Frances Ingram”—the pen name for the advertising department at Ingram’s Milkwood Cream—wondering if “maybe my appearance affected my chance at promotion,” “Frances Ingram” replied that in the current “age of self-development” there was an intimate relationship between “internal cleanliness” and a “radiant, attractive, and likeable” exterior.
²³

“When a woman has a bad complexion,” advised “Frances Ingram,” “people notice immediately, and they have to get past it before they really like a person. I believe that the dullness of your complexion may have reacted on your subconscious in such a way that your confidence in yourself has become impaired.” The answer: Buy more Ingram’s Milkwood Cream.

Change came swiftly: By the late 1920s, industry analysts claimed that 90 percent of adult women used face powder, 83 percent used talcum, 73 percent applied perfume, and 55 percent used rouge.
²⁴

City women were more likely to use makeup than their small-town and country sisters, though even in the metropolis there was a wide gulf among women of different classes. An industry analyst noted that wealthy women in Chicago tended to use cosmetics “very carefully and sparingly,” whereas working-class women “use it in astonishing quantities.” Another commentator lamented that “the shop girl has lost all sense of perspective. Each of her cheeks is a blooming peony. Her eyes are two smudges of dusky, shadowy black. Her lips are cruel with scarlet.”

Department store counter clerks learned to differentiate among customers—Arden for the smart set, Pond’s for the working girl, Elcaya for everyone in between. And in cities like New York and Chicago, it was common knowledge that young “Jewish flappers” preferred Angelus lipstick in dark red or orange. “All Jewish girls use it,” explained a counter clerk who, according to an interviewer, “never asks what brand they want but gets the Angelus drawer out when she sees them coming.”

As for rural America, “Towns under 1,000 are hopeless,” sighed a cosmetics account representative at the J. Walter Thompson agency. That wouldn’t be the case for long. A study of two thousand rural women conducted by
Farm Journal
just before World War II found almost universal use of face powder and widespread use of lipstick.

Surveys of college women—the first generation raised on aggressive consumer advertising, movies, and radio—revealed that 85 percent used rouge, lipstick, face powder, and nail polish. At Vassar College, the J. Walter Thompson agency found that “again and again phrases that had been used in the Woodbury advertising were used by the girls, with apparent unconsciousness.”

When prompted to describe the virtues of Woodbury cold cream, coeds at the University of Chicago repeated almost verbatim the product’s advertising copy—“[it] actually draws the dust and dirt out of the pores,” “one feels deliciously clean and fresh after using it.” At Smith College, a student admitted without prompting that she used Woodbury cream because she “longed for romance and thought perhaps a beautiful complexion would make me more fascinating.”

Even in small cities, by the 1920s well over half of local newspapers ran advertisements for beauty products.

Just as advertisers made makeup and toiletries compulsory in the 1920s, they constantly drove home the idea that “appearances count for a great deal in this critical world of ours.”
²⁵
“The well-dressed man may be no better than his opposite,” explained a clothing ad, “but he’ll meet with more consideration every time. Therefore, if you’re looking for success, dress well.”

Advertisers encouraged women to “make up your LIPS for KISSES!” but also warned of the dire consequences that surely fol
lowed from inadequate attention to detail. A typical ad featured a woman who was “innocent yet men talked.”
²⁶
She was wearing the wrong kind of lipstick—a brand that marked her as cheap. “You cannot afford to make yourself ridiculous,” cautioned the new apostles of modernity, “if you have started for success, you want to attract a REAL man.”

With trusted authorities like Dorothy Dix warning that “the world judges us by appearance,” a local newspaper in Muncie detected a new everyday fastidiousness about style and dress.
²⁷
“People weren’t as particular in former days about what they wore Monday through Saturday,” but “the Sunday suit of clothes is one of the institutions that is vanishing in our generation.… Even the overall brigade is apt to wear the same suit week-day evenings as on Sunday.”

“The dresses girls wear to school now used to be considered party dresses,” marveled one mother.
²⁸
“My daughter would consider herself terribly abused if she had to wear the same dress to school two successive days.”

When another Muncie homemaker sent her thirteen-year-old daughter to school clad in a pretty (and hardly inexpensive) gingham dress and lisle hose, she was shocked to find the girl on the verge of tears the next day. “Mother, I am just an object of mercy!” cried the daughter. Her parents reluctantly gave in and bought her a new wardrobe of silk dresses and silk stockings, in the popular flapper style.

High school sororities placed a high premium on attire. “We have to have boys for the Christmas dances,” explained a popular Muncie High School student, “so we take in the girls who can bring the boys.” A recent recruit explained her sudden, newfound popularity this way: “I’ve known these girls always, but I’ve never been asked to join before; it’s just clothes and money that makes the difference. Mother has let me spend more money on clothes this last year.”

It was harder for working families to keep their daughters suitably attired. A Muncie mother living on an annual household budget of $1,363 complained that her daughters, ages eleven and twelve, were “so stuck up I can’t sew for them anymore.”
²⁹

Just making it to graduation day was an expensive affair. A
respectable girl “needs three or four new dresses for graduation,” remarked another Muncie mom. And this wasn’t counting the fifteen or so new dresses needed each year for Christmas dances, fraternity and sorority dances, school recitals …

If parents of would-be flappers were most concerned by the skyrocketing costs of maintaining their daughters’ popularity and self-esteem, newspaper editorials were more concerned by the political implications of flapper attire. As the Lynds recognized, the insistence on “more comfort, looser clothing, and greater freedom of limb” went hand in hand with the “newer freedom and aggressiveness of women.”
³⁰
When a lawsuit erupted in a small town near Muncie over the right of schoolgirls to wear knickers instead of skirts, commentators could only ask, “Where will this freedom end?”

No doubt the young women who fought for the right to wear knickers saw it as a bid for personal freedom. But their audacious ideas about what to wear and how to behave were not entirely their own. Their imaginations were nurtured by Madison Avenue, of course, but it was the great Jazz Age movie moguls who really sealed the deal—who shaped popular notions about the female body and how it should be displayed that endure to this day.

Their story begins on a studio lot in Hollywood, California, where dry desert ground that was once surrounded by vast, rambling valleys lush with citrus groves was now cultivating a nation’s dreams.

Part Three

Screen actress Colleen Moore played the starring role in
The Perfect Flapper, 1924.

20
P
APA
, W
HAT
I
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B
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I
N MID
-1923, as millions of young women eagerly turned the pages of their glossy magazines in search of the latest flapper fashion tips, the national press was abuzz with news of a scandalous new film called
Flaming Youth.