1920s Fashion and Clothing: From Corsets to Drop-Waist Dresses

The single most visible transformation of the Roaring Twenties took place on the bodies of the women and men who lived through it. The fashion of 1920 was almost Victorian: tightly corseted, floor-length, and modest. The fashion of 1929 was something else: a straight, knee-baring, boyish silhouette, an industry built on ready-to-wear, and a vocabulary of dress that would define modern style for the rest of the century. For the broader context, see the parent daily life in the 1920s; for a snapshot of what these clothes cost, see the cost of living in the 1920s; and for how fashion fit into the household,

The Death of the Corset

The most important single change in 1920s women’s fashion was the abandonment of the corset. For more than three hundred years, the corset had shaped the female body into an hourglass. The new generation of women rejected this ideal entirely. By 1921, the American corset industry had collapsed: corset sales fell by more than two-thirds in just two years, and the word itself came to mean something old-fashioned.

The garment that replaced the corset was the brassiere. The modern bra had been invented twice in the years just before the 1920s: in 1913, New York socialite Mary Phelps Jacob patented a brassiere she had stitched from two handkerchiefs and a ribbon because her corset showed through her evening gown; in 1914, the German inventor Hugo Schindler patented the first commercially produced brassiere. By 1920, the brassiere had become standard. The new step-in panties, the garter belts, and the camisole replaced the old combination undergarment, and the long-line corset was reduced to a brief elasticized belt.

The New Silhouette

The shape that replaced the corset was a complete inversion. The new flapper dress was straight and tubular, hanging from the shoulders or the hips to a hem that, by the middle of the decade, was sitting several inches above the knee. The waist was dropped to the hip, producing the famous drop-waist dress that has become the era’s visual signature. The bust was flattened, the hips de-emphasized, and the overall effect was androgynous.

The dress itself was simple in cut and elaborate in surface. Beadwork, embroidery, appliqué, and metallic trim covered the dresses of the mid-1920s, especially for evening. The fabrics were light: silk, satin, chiffon, and — for the more daring — the new rayon, an artificial silk that DuPont began marketing in 1924. The hemlines rose through the decade. In 1920, the hem reached the ankle. By 1926, the most daring hems were at the top of the knee — a revelation so shocking that the newspapers ran editorials denouncing it.

Cloches, Bobs, and T-Straps

The flapper head was as distinctive as the flapper body. The cloche hat — a close-fitting, bell-shaped hat pulled down over the eyebrows — was the era’s defining headwear, designed to fit the new bobbed haircut pioneered by the Polish-born hairdresser Antoine of Paris. By 1925, the bob was so common that census-takers in some American cities reported a measurable drop in the consumption of women’s hairpins. The feet of the new woman were also new. The T-strap shoe — a low-heeled, instep-strap pump — replaced the high-buttoned boot. The new shoe exposed the ankle, the new hemline exposed the calf, and the entire lower leg of the flapper was on display in a way that had never been possible before.

Paris, Hollywood, and the Mass Market

The high fashion of the 1920s was made in Paris. The two most important designers were Coco Chanel and Madeleine Vionnet. Chanel, who had opened her first shop in Deauville in 1913, invented the little black dress in 1926 — Vogue magazine called it “the Ford of fashion.” Vionnet was the great technician of the decade, the inventor of the bias cut, in which fabric is cut on the diagonal so that it clings to the body.

But the fashion that most American women actually wore was determined in Hollywood. The stars of the silent screen — Clara Bow, Joan Crawford, Gloria Swanson, Greta Garbo, Louise Brooks — were the most-watched women in the world, and their costumes were copied in department stores within weeks. The ready-to-wear industry exploded. The new chain stores — Woolworth’s, Sears Roebuck, J.C. Penney — sold mass-produced versions of high-fashion designs at prices that ordinary women could afford.

Makeup Goes Mainstream

One of the most important changes of the 1920s was the move of makeup from the demimonde to the department store. The use of cosmetics had been the secret of actresses and prostitutes for generations. By 1925, the situation had reversed. The most important figures in the change were two immigrant entrepreneurs, Max Factor and Helena Rubinstein. Factor opened a makeup shop in Los Angeles in 1909 and developed the first motion-picture makeup in 1914. Rubinstein opened her first American shop in New York in 1915 and built a global cosmetics empire. Together, they made eye shadow, mascara, lipstick, and rouge ordinary parts of the American woman’s morning routine.

Men’s Fashion: Oxford Bags and Raccoon Coats

The 1920s also remade men’s fashion. The most distinctive garment was the Oxford bag: trousers so wide at the cuff — sometimes 20 to 24 inches around — that they flapped when the wearer walked. The look was completed by the raccoon coat, a long, heavy overcoat that became the unofficial uniform of the college man between 1925 and 1930. The two-tone shoe — black and white, or black and tan — was the most distinctive footwear. The straw boater was the hat of the young man, and the Homburg or fedora was the hat of his father. The single most influential young man in 1920s fashion was Edward, the Prince of Wales, whose wardrobe was copied in detail by upper-middle-class American men.

Sportswear, Swimwear, and the Department Store

The 1920s also invented modern sportswear. The country club — the golf course, the tennis court, the swimming pool — became a major venue of upper-middle-class life, and the clothing for it became a major industry. Coco Chanel’s 1916 design for a loose-fitting sweater and skirt helped invent the modern idea of casual women’s sportswear. The department store was the engine of the 1920s fashion revolution. Wanamaker’s, Marshall Field’s, Macy’s, and Bullock’s did more to spread the flapper look than any Parisian salon, turning the act of buying a dress into a form of mass entertainment. The fashion revolution of the 1920s was about more than clothes — it was about who got to decide what a woman wore, and why, and for whom. The flapper dress was, in part, a uniform of liberation: a way of announcing, in a single garment, that the woman inside it was modern, mobile, and free. The skirt rose, the waist dropped, the corset disappeared, and the lipstick went on, and the woman who walked out the door in 1929 was, in every sense, a different person from the one who had walked out in 1919. The fashion was the visible sign of a change that was, in fact, total.