1920s Fashion Quotes

When I went to Hollywood in 1927, the girls were wearing lumpy sweaters and skirts. I was wearing sleek suits and half naked beaded gowns and piles and piles of furs.

A seersucker suit is one of the most iconic styles dating from the 1920s and is still a gentleman's best bet when it's hot and sticky.

When eyeliner was introduced in the Twenties by Max Factor, a pioneer of Hollywood film cosmetics who began selling to the public, even the word 'makeup' was a revelation.

Phryne Fisher could walk down the red carpet; Essie Davis is something else.

In the early '20s, with the war over, there was a period of celebration, and you can see it in the fashion.

Joan Crawford is doubtless the best example of the flapper, the girl you see in smart night clubs, gowned to the apex of sophistication, toying iced glasses with a remote, faintly bitter expression, dancing deliciously, laughing a great deal, with wide, hurt eyes. Young things with a talent for living.

Oh, both my shoes are shiny new, And pristine is my hat My dress is 1922… My life is all like that.

The Flapper awoke from her lethargy of sub-deb-ism, bobbed her hair, put on her choicest pair of earrings and a great deal of audacity and rouge and went into the battle. She flirted because it was fun to flirt and wore a one-piece bathing suit because she had a good figure she was conscious that the things she did were the things she had always wanted to do. Mothers disapproved of their sons taking the Flapper to dances, to teas, to swim and most of all to heart.

I asked my designer friend, Sam Klemick, to make a headdress for me, drawing inspiration from 1920s headpieces, Athena and Joan of Arc. Before each show, I have this quiet meditative moment where I put the headdress on and gather my thoughts and strength.

I have pictures of my grandmother from the 1920s and '30s in avant-garde dresses that looked like they could have come from the House of Worth or Lucien Lelong. She would never say if they were couture, but I do recall her telling me, 'All my clothes and shoes came from Paris.'

I looked at a lot of photos from Hollywood in the '20s, photographs of silent movies being filmed all over the world which are very specific and very evocative. Berenice, the lead actress, is my wife. She really followed the same path with me.

I feel that, historically, the Art Deco period has the most resonance for me. As a person, it has to be the plucky Clara Bow, the heroine of American silent movies of the 1920s. She embodied feminine dressing mixed with men's style. All this then evolved into the exquisite style and simplicity of Coco Chanel.