quite untrimmed, its plainness being relieved by a sash knotted carelessly around the skirt." An advertisement for the 1920 silent film comedy The Flapper, with Olive Thomas, before the look of the flapper had started to coalesce.īy November 1910, the word was popular enough for A. The sketch is of a girl in a frock with a long skirt, "which has the waistline quite high and semi- Empire. , in fact, would scarcely merit the honour of a moment of my attention, but for the fact that I seek in vain for any other expression that is understood to signify that important young person, the maiden of some sixteen years. call the subject of these lines the 'flapper.' The appropriateness of this term does not move me to such whole-hearted admiration of the amazing powers of enriching our language which the Americans modestly acknowledge they possess. In April 1908, the fashion section of London's The Globe and Traveller contained a sketch entitled "The Dress of the Young Girl" with the following explanation:Īmericans, and those fortunate English folk whose money and status permit them to go in freely for slang terms. īy 1908, newspapers as serious as The Times used the term, although with careful explanation: "A 'flapper', we may explain, is a young lady who has not yet been promoted to long frocks and the wearing of her hair 'up '".
This move became quite a competitive dance during this era. The flapper was also known as a dancer, who danced like a bird-flapping her arms while doing the Charleston move. In 1907, English actor George Graves explained it to Americans as theatrical slang for acrobatic young female stage performers. The standard non-slang usage appeared in print as early as 1903 in England and 1904 in the United States, when novelist Desmond Coke used it in his college story of Oxford life, Sandford of Merton: "There's a stunning flapper". By the 1890s, the word "flapper" was used in some localities as slang both for a very young prostitute, and, in a more general and less derogatory sense, of any lively mid-teenage girl. The slang word "flap" was used for a young prostitute as early as 1631. The slang term "flapper" may derive from an earlier use in northern England to mean "teenage girl", referring to one whose hair is not yet put up and whose plaited pigtail "flapped" on her back, or from an older word meaning "prostitute". While primarily associated with the United States, the "modern girl" archetype was a worldwide phenomenon that had other names depending on the country, such as joven moderna in Argentina or garçonne in France, although the American term "flapper" was the most widespread internationally. They claimed that the flappers' dresses were "near nakedness", and that flappers were "flippant", "reckless", and unintelligent. There was a reaction to this counterculture from more conservative people, who belonged mostly to older generations. įlappers are icons of the Roaring Twenties, the social, political turbulence, and increased transatlantic cultural exchange that followed the end of World War I, as well as the export of American jazz culture to Europe. As automobiles became more available, flappers gained freedom of movement and privacy.
Flappers were seen as brash for wearing excessive makeup, drinking alcohol, smoking cigarettes in public, driving automobiles, treating sex in a casual manner, and otherwise flouting social and sexual norms. Flappers were a subculture of young Western women in the 1920s who wore short skirts (knee height was considered short during that period), bobbed their hair, listened to jazz, and flaunted their disdain for what was then considered acceptable behavior.
0 kommentar(er)
