Art Deco Fashion

Style Advice for Fashion Lovers

Read about fashion & style

Tangible information on how to dress for your body shape, lifestyle, fashion persona and budget. Learn about upcoming trends and how to wear them. See real life ensembles and wardrobe capsules.

Discuss your personal style

Get advice from a lively and supportive community. Share your own outfit photos. Join outfit challenges. And if you like, start your own style blog with the simplest blogging tool on the Internet.

Collect your fashion finds

Manage your items in a convenient shopping list. Keep an online record of everything in your wardrobe. Group your finds into ensembles and capsules. And get alerts when prices drop in your collection.

by Suzanne Lussier

From flapper dresses, feathers and beaded evening frocks for dancing the Charleston to sporty outfits and chic ensembles designed for luxury travel, fashion exploded during the Roaring Twenties, when clothes became a symbol of a more liberated lifestyle. This compact book focusses on the art deco fashions of the 1920’s, and uses sketches, outfit and jewellery photos, images from fashion magazines and evocative illustrations from the Victoria and Albert Museum’s dress collection to recreate this glamorous era.

Books · Retrospective

1 review · Add a review ·

Amazon

La Francaise

Rating ·

I can hardly believe this book has popped up on YLF! I might be a bit hasty in reviewing it (I usually like to read a book twice, at least in part), before thrusting my opinions on you, but I feel almost compelled to make an exception here! You see, I bought this very book in the V&A bookshop in London last weekend, and I’ve been falling asleep with it every night. Not that the book is soporific: it’s anything but. I simply mean that whenever I have a spare moment, I’m dipping into it. And this is a book for dipping into. The pictures and illustrations are well worth it. I was lucky. I bought it after visiting the art deco fashion section in the V&A.

While there, I was struck by just how vast the shift was from Edwardian dress to the ‘flapper’ style, and all in a few short years. Struck too, by the enduring impact this exciting fashion decade has on our current style. This book could be the perfect relaxing holiday read, because it is totally undemanding. You can just revel in the glorious photography and artwork. But if you are of a more contemplative nature, it has something for you, too. For it is both inspiring, and, as I alluded earlier, thought-provoking when one considers just how the horrendous First World War, with its horrific casualties on all sides, truly was. Yet because women were for the first time ever expected to perform ‘man’s work’ to replace all those men fighting on the front, it contributed to freeing them, and subsequent generations of women from centuries of shackles. Women needed practical clothes! For the first time, a woman’s silhouette could truly be seen and she could breathe freely. And, as hostilities ended and the 1920s dawned, she could (and did) wear pants, bob her hair, cast aside her corsets, dance freely and sensuously, enjoy cocktails, talk unchaperoned with the opposite sex, and (on a less positive note): smoke!!! And we only have to think of Coco Chanel to realise the rich legacy the flappers left us: palazzo pants; simple sweater dresses; the Breton top; the Little Black dress, and, of course, the iconic No.5. I’d love to be able to revisit that period, just for a day or two, and soak up the heady atmosphere of those slightly risquée days. But since that isn’t possible, I have, thankfully the pages of this book to transport me there, at least in my imagination! A highly recommended read!

August 3, 2012 at 4:04 pm

Share this Post

Share this Post