NEW YORK CITY.- The Museum of the City of New York presents today “Roaring into the Twenties: The New New York Woman,” on view through September 14, 2003. The project, a collaboration between the Museum and The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, features a wide range of beautiful vintage objects from the collections of both institutions. In the Roaring Twenties that followed World War I, Americans were shocked and fascinated by what they called the “new woman,” with her short skirts, bared knees, bobbed hair, and new social freedoms. Newly-enfranchised, liberated from Victorianism, and emboldened by their wartime experiences, women in the 1920s embraced new life styles, new fashions, and a new visibility in the workforce. Nowhere was this change felt more profoundly than in New York City. Here, a trio of local industries geared toward women consumers – fashion, entertainment, and health and beauty – burgeoned under the leadership of a new generation of female business leaders.
Roaring into the Twenties highlights some of the most influential New York women of the era – including Elizabeth Arden, Miriam Haskell, and Helena Rubinstein – and their impact on style, consumption, and the image of the “new women” in all walks of life. At the heart of the exhibition is the irrevocable break with fashion tradition that came in the 1920s. An entirely novel design vocabulary emerged, emphasizing the simplified and streamlined “flapper” style. A visual focal point of Roaring into the Twenties is a wall of evening dresses highlighting the ornate fabric surface decorations typical of this period – deceptively simple slip dresses of lamé velvet or chiffon, designed for dancing “the Shimmy,” and the extraordinarily ornate beaded dresses, some created by such leading European and American designers as Chanel, Poiret, Callot Soeurs, and Lanvin.
Roaring into the Twenties also goes beyond the “flapper” image to look at women of the theater, dance, music, and film industries whose careers swayed both fashion and social mores. Among the entertainers whose styles and creative feats are profiled are theatrical luminaries Elizabeth Welsh (who introduced “the Charleston”), Ann Pennington (who introduced “The Black Bottom”), Gertrude Saunders (who was featured in Shuffle Along, 1923), and the inimitable Sophie Tucker. A newly-visible generation of female playwrights and scriptwriters who helped to shape the New York stage, including Harriet Ford, Anita Loos, Anne Nichols, and Dorothy Parker, pioneered their own 1920s versions of business attire, also highlighted in the exhibition. Roaring into the Twenties: The New New York Woman is made possible in part by a generous grant from Con Edison.