FOR my birthday last month a dear friend sent me a gorgeous card depicting an art nouveau image of a girl in 1920s dress reclining on a virtual chaise longue. It got me thinking about how elegant and beautifully feminine the fashion of that period was and how insipid and downright dull today’s is. That is if the term is still appropriate for many of the cheaply produced rags that are sold in shops now under the pretence of constituting ‘fashion’.
Folk talk nostalgically of the 60s and how free and easy things were, but I always like to imagine that the 20s were a pretty good time too. Perhaps it’s not even that hard to see why. WWI was just over, prosperity was beginning to burgeon again and people were embracing a new sense of liberation with gusto. Personally I believe it was actually more a brief period of reprieve, culturally and politically, between the two World Wars and that it is not too wide of the mark to draw comparisons between the 20s and 60s. Even though, by 1960, the second World War had been over for fifteen years they had been a fairly austere time in many ways and the economical recovery took somewhat longer because of it. Therefore, the 1960s saw an even greater collective sigh of relief, so to speak, resulting in new and more extreme expressions of personal as well as artistic freedom.
07/04/09
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