Short Stuff: Flappers

The Origin of the Flapper

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1:13Hey, and welcome to The Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here doing the Charleston on Dave's behalf, and this is Stuff You Should Know Short Stuff. Let's go now. All right. The year 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. What a great mag.

1:44Yeah. By the way, we should say that Private Eye is not a rag over in the U.K., so sorry, everybody. I'm going to go ahead and assume The Smart Set wasn't either. But in this article or essay, Minkin is using a term that's already been established, flapper. It was, I think, British slang for a young girl, right? Yeah. He's saying, no, no, no. We need to get more specific. There is 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.

2:24There's this new thing called media that is coming up, and that's 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, updo hair-wearing, choker, you know, like, dress that goes, skirt that goes all the way past the ankle and like a choker up to under the chin.

3:02That's the Gibson girl look. And the flapper came along and said, no, 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 a one-two 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.

3:36They were needed more than ever. Like, in the workforce, they needed to be educated. And 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 Twenties came on the scene. There 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 prohibition, which sent people into underground bars hanging out.

4:19And then the right to vote. And both of these things were sort of like a rejection of the Victorian code that came before. Yeah. 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 guard and starting anew. And it was led by this leading edge of young, like, early 20s, late teens girls who just completely just changed everything.

4:56They went against so many norms. They started smoking. They started drinking. Women did not do those things at that time. They started wearing makeup. Women did not wear makeup unless you were a sex worker or an actress. They just did all this 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 under lock and key of their home or their parents' homes.

5:30But 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. KDKA in 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.

6:01Yeah. People driving around in convertibles in New York, booming Jay-Z. It was amazing. Yeah. I thought that was so stupid. No. It was great. Let's take a break and we'll come back. Chuck and I are going to work out whether that was actually stupid or not. You know, eating is a huge part of our lives.

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8:57This is a Conger joint from How Stuff Works, this article was. That's right. Go check out Unladylike, the podcast. It's great. And so is Kristen.

The Flapper Look and Lifestyle

9:05Exactly.

The Flapper Look and Lifestyle

9:06So there was a new woman that emerged from that right to vote. 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 speakeasies, 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.

9:37The flappers were like, yeah, you go have fun with that. We're going to go get wasted and hang out in speakeasies in New York and just live our funnest lives. Yeah, or maybe go see a Clara Bow movie because in 1922, Clara Bow debuted in Beyond the Rainbow and kind of defined the flapper look. She had that hair bobbed. She had a little bit of makeup on 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.

10:13Scott Fitzgerald when he first gained fame, I think I think before she was writing even. And she was sort of one of the first big it girls and certainly embodied that flapper style. Yeah. Also, I don't want I don't know who I said was the first it girl, but I was wrong. It was in some other podcast a while back. But whoever it was, was in like the 40s or 50s. But that sounds familiar. Clara Bow is the actual first it girl. OK. And then I guess Zelda Fitzgerald was the first real life it girl.

10:44But let's talk about some of those fashions that people like Clara Bow and Zelda Fitzgerald rocked. A lot of it was being designed by Coco Chanel. Yeah. Like the real deal Coco Chanel was designing in Paris during this time. And the that whole like Victorian era corset S figure shape was just thrown totally out the window. And instead it was boyish bodies with drapey, boxy skirts, essentially.

11:15Yeah. That was like that sack dress was like the flapper uniform. The fabric literally was lighter. Conger 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, you know, weight in their clothing to just be freer. The flapper dress basically was about mid-calf in length. By the late 1920s, it inched above the knee a little bit.

11:47But, you know, so they could dance. So they could do the Charleston and the Foxtrot. 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. Yeah. One of the other things that is like, like you said, the flapper uniform was the cloche hat. I never knew that's what it was called. Yeah. But it's like a almost brimless hat. It's very close to the head. Usually it has a big bow. And it would show off their hairdo, which is usually quite short.

12:19You mentioned that those Gibson girls had like the big updo or else like long flowy hair. Or 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 girl's haircut. I think it was called the Eaton crop. Yeah. And they might use the pomade to like slick it back like a man might. They would show their a lot of those flapper dresses had no arms. So they were showing their arms for the first time. Scandalous. Very scandalous.

12:49A 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 hosiery. And sometimes, oh boy, they would roll down that hosiery a little bit to like a makeshift knee high. Not a good look. Oh, I think it is. Do you? You like the roll down knee high look? Yeah. I was raised Baptist. All that stuff is very titillating. I think my problem is I associate that with mama for mama's family.

13:20Yeah, that'll do it. Yeah. That'll definitely dampen your thoughts.

The End of an Era

13:25So all of this flapper party came and went in less than a decade. I mean, Clara Bow hit the scene in 1922 and she was the one in 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. And that was kind of it. The stock market crash was like literally the very end. It was October 29th, 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.

14:03Yeah. The fun was over. And so was Prohibition, too, because America really needed to start drinking again. So there went the speakeasy and all that stuff. And I think that means short stuff's over, 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 from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. I'll see you next time.