100 years old

They marked the peak of the party and elegance…

The Roaring Twenties are one hundred years old, and thwarted as it is by the global Covid-19 pandemic and the claims of many minorities, our society doesn’t want to celebrate this anniversary. It is, however, a period that was both a time of great pleasure and of the greatest elegance.  

In fact, the decade was the last eminently light and creative period of modern times. Coming after the trauma of the First World War, the 1920s were marked by an desire to freedom and a spirit of celebration that only gave in to the first trauma due to the world of finance: the Black Thursday crash of 1929. In the breeding ground of misery that the latter would create, all the conditions for the Second World War would be met and prosper to bring us to this new nightmare. But before plunging into its despair, the Western world would experience a decade of celebration and enjoy what remains a hundred years later, in the eyes of connoisseurs, a benchmark of elegance that has never been equalled.

Let us not forget, however, that these Roaring Twenties ran through the entire decade of the 1920s: if the economic situation deprived us of commemorating the formidable breath of the young generation of the “Never Again! ” let us not forget that it lasted about ten years and reached its peak in 1926 and 1927, and that it is therefore not too late to recall it to our good memory.

Never before has a city brought together so many artistic and literary talents

At the dawn of the 1920s, Europe was licking its wounds and trying to recover from the trauma of the First World War. “Never again! “is the watchword of the generation in their twenties and thirties, which has paid the heaviest price. 1.4 million men lost their lives in the conflict, leaving as many women destitute and forced to work, at a time when this was not yet the norm. Of all the European countries, France has been the most affected and there is a desire to enjoy life and grasp all its pleasures that has never been seen before. This is just as well: the soldiers of the American Expeditionary Force who intervened massively at our side in the spring of 1918 brought in their luggage the new music that was all the rage across the Atlantic: jazz; and soon its rhythms invaded cabarets and dance halls. In the middle of the decade, the craze of the early days was transformed into a wave of enthusiasm when a Franco-American dancer named Josephine Baker performed “La Revue nègre” at the Théâtre des Champs Elysées, which alternated jazz-band music, burlesque and wild dances. The performance by the very naked young woman first caused a scandal (to the great pleasure of André Daven, the theatre’s artistic director, who had been looking for a second wind for his establishment since the end of the performances of Diaghilev’s “Ballets Russes” in 1917) before making headlines and sweeping all of Paris into a new musical frenzy. For the record, it was the painter Fernand Léger, a great lover of Negro art and black music, who convinced his friend Daven to set up a revue performed exclusively by Blacks, and it was in New York that the twenty-person troupe that was to perform in Paris was formed, including clarinettist Sidney Bechet and chorister Josephine Baker. By some inexplicable contraction, the secret of which lies in history, Baker is still associated with “La Revue nègre”, although the dancer only performed from the beginning of October to the end of December 1925, leaving the show to set up her own revue, “La folie du jour”, at the Folies Bergères (and inaugurate her famous “banana skirt”) while the revamped troupe took “La Revue nègre” on tour to Brussels and Berlin. In Paris, jazz and Charleston marked the Roaring Twenties, bringing Parisians a lightness that in retrospect the whole world would envy them, and influencing the way of thinking of the time.

Going far beyond our borders, the spirit of the Paris of the Roaring Twenties will attract artists from all horizons to France, and in particular the best of the American intelligentzia. The playwright Gertrude Stein, who has lived in Paris since 1904 and played a major part in the development of modern art (and played a decisive role in the careers of Picasso and Picabia), will support with the same enthusiasm the writers of what she will call the lost generation: Ernest Hemingway, Francis Scott Fitzgerald and Henry Miller, whom she will introduce to Braque, Matisse and of course Picasso. If you think about it, no city has ever, either before or since, gathered as much talent as the Paris of the Roaring Twenties. At the Closerie des Lilas and the Bœuf sur le toit the most fashionable French authors, such as Aragon, Breton and Eluard, crossed paths with their American colleagues (Wharton, Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Miller for whom the crossroads of boulevards Montparnasse-Raspail-Vavin is “the navel of the world”…), James Joyce who found his first publisher in Paris, the painters Dali, Ernst, Miro and Picabia, the future directors Bunuel, Clair and Cocteau, the fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli… Two districts constitute the epicentre of this international cultural and artistic community: Montparnasse and Montmartre.

The most elegant decade

Closer to the editorial line of this magazine, the fashion of the Roaring Twenties is, in the opinion of connoisseurs (fashion experts and professionals but also the elegant themselves), the most elegant and glamorous of the last 120 years. It is characterised for men by very fitted cuts that break with the trend of previous years, and for women by a wardrobe revolution.

On the men’s side, the suit, still three-piece, is worn much closer to the body than in the previous decade. The cut is straight with two or three buttons, or double-breasted, and the fabrics are discreet, with plain or striped wools in grey, beige and brown: navy blue has not become as popular as it would later become. The trousers have a large lapel of four or five centimetres (depending on the size of the wearer) and are worn exclusively with straps, and the shirt has not yet finished molting and still has removable collars and cuffs, which are washed with each use unlike the body. The shoes are for the most elegant of the laced boots, like their Belle Epoque elders, and for the others of the oxford (a lot) and derbys (a little), the loafer only appearing in the 1930s.

Finally, the men adopted the hat at a very young age (around twenty), which was made of felt in winter and mid-season and straw in summer, and came in trilby, canoe and, towards the end of the decade, fedora.

For women, the evolution of fashion was much more radical, as it turned its back on the stinking and constraining creations of the previous decades: the war had gone through it, forcing wives to have a professional occupation, and the women of the 1920s wanted to continue to work in order to enjoy a certain independence, and to do so they wore clothes that were more comfortable than those they had worn until 1914. Heavy dresses and corsets were abandoned, and simple shapes and lighter, sexier clothes were introduced. The length of dresses and skirts became shorter up to the knee: a revolution! This was followed by the adoption of trousers, borrowed from men and declined for women in a loose fit, possibly with a buttoned bridge. The same goes for shoes, whose small heels inspired by tango dancers (then very fashionable) proved to be so comfortable. In the evening or on sunny days, they give way to espadrilles whose straps dress the calf in a very sensual way. A sign of the times: these ladies discovered a designer who understood them perfectly: her name is Gabriele Chanel, she made herself known in the 1910s and has just opened her first Parisian boutique on rue Cambon. The little black dress and the jersey sweaters she launched then will never go out of fashion. No more than her first perfume, N°5, which she launched in 1921. For modern women, “Coco” was to become more than a designer: a muse, who imposed new standards for feminine beauty. To resemble her, they cut their hair “à la garçonne” and bandage their breasts to look more androgynous.

One hundred years later

A century later, the fashion of the 1920s is still considered the most elegant in history. For men, this distinction is essentially due to the enhancing silhouette given by the fitted cuts, to the high waist of the trousers, which is in the same perspective, and to the attention that the gentlemen of the time paid to their attire. And it is not uninteresting, with hindsight, to consider the similarities between this happy era and the extremely troubled one we are going through nowadays. Let’s judge for ourselves: in 1920, the world was recovering from the First World War and the Spanish flu epidemic, plus successive technical revolutions (electricity, the car, and soon household appliances) which helped to revive its very weakened economy.

2020: several major geopolitical conflicts have marked the past two decades (September 11th, Arab Spring, yellow jackets in France…), the world is still immobilised for the moment by the Covid-19 pandemic and several technological innovations, such as digital, new energies and 5G, promise to revive our very weakened economies. Moreover, humanity is now aware that it has reached a decisive turning point in terms of consumption patterns, which will disrupt our lives by forcing us to change our ways of eating, housing and heating, and moving around – in short: of living.

For the first time in our history, we are going to aspire to consume less than our elders, but to consume better, by supervising a voluntary decrease which should favour short circuits (and therefore the local economy) and recycling, i.e. second-hand products, a development which directly concerns clothing. So if the face of our daily environment is going to change significantly over the next ten to twenty years, we have to manage a deep social crisis whose origins go back to the policies carried out since the end of the “Glorious Thirties”, which could well be our own Second World War if we do not become more aware of the dangers that await us than our elders did of Hitler’s gesticulations during the 1930s. At least we will have the consolation to tell ourselves, should our governments prove incapable of resolving the challenges before them, that in the footsteps of our elders of the Roaring Twenties, we will have lived through a decade of elegance, chosen for us in awareness of what the future holds. This lightness in the storm is precisely one of the characteristics of the Swann Society that is the common thread running through this issue.

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Films to watch

– Henry & June

Excellent. Adapted from Anaïs Nin’s eponymous book, Anaïs Nin’s meeting with Henry Miller in Paris in 1931. A sulphurous relationship beautifully served by Fred Ward (Miller), Maria de Medeiros (Nin), Uma Thurman (June Miller), Richard E. Grant and Kevin Spacey. A marvel for lovers of life in Paris at that time.

– Coco & Igor

In 1920 Coco Chanel put her house in Garches at the disposal of Igor Stavinsky and his family, political refugees. The disappearance of Boy Capel, her lover and financier, throws the creator into the musician’s arms. Beyond the costumes and sets, a remarkable performance by Anna Mouglalis and Mads Mikkelsen.

– Magic in the moonlight

The French Riviera in the 20’s, a very aesthetic Woody Allen for its suits, its decors and… the Alfa Romeo 6C 1750 which circulates there.

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