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Anything Goes: A Biography of the Roaring Twenties

The glitter of 1920s America was seductive, from jazz, flappers, and wild all night parties to the birth of Hollywood and a glamorous gangster-led crime scene flourishing under Prohibition. But the period was also punctuated by momentous events‹the political show trials of Sacco and Vanzetti, the huge Ku Klux Klan march down Washington, D.C.?s Pennsylvania Avenue‹and it produced a dizzying array of writers, musicians, and film stars, from F. Scott Fitzgerald to Bessie Smith and Charlie Chaplin.

In Anything Goes, Lucy Moore interweaves the stories of the compelling people and events that characterized the decade to produce a gripping portrait of the Jazz Age. She reveals that the Roaring Twenties were more than just ?the years between wars.? It was an epoch of passion and change‹an age, she observes, not unlike our own.

The glitter of 1920s America was seductive, from jazz, flappers, and wild all night parties to the birth of Hollywood and a glamorous gangster-led crime scene flourishing under Prohibition. But the period was also punctuated by momentous events‹the political show trials of Sacco and Vanzetti, the huge Ku Klux Klan march down Washington, D.C.?s Pennsylvania Avenue‹and it produced a dizzying array of writers, musicians, and film stars, from F. Scott Fitzgerald to Bessie Smith and Charlie Chaplin.

In Anything Goes, Lucy Moore interweaves the stories of the compelling people and events that characterized the decade to produce a gripping portrait of the Jazz Age. She reveals that the Roaring Twenties were more than just ?the years between wars.? It was an epoch of passion and change‹an age, she observes, not unlike our own.

The imagined one-piece midnight-black evening shift idealy would be fashioned out of French voile (silk), heavily embroidered, beaded and sequenced. The versatility of the number at first glance might be undetectable, but there is the chance for the wearer to alter the hemline herself by hiking the dress up over the hips to knee-length to mid-thigh. This capacity to float the hemline, is one inspired from the original early 20thc design of the dress. some sought to be daring and move the hemline from ankle to knee if the environment allowed.
In terms of style, the dress marries both the popular movements of English Arts and Craft (note the Charles Rennie Mackintosh inspired central motif) and Parisian Art Deco. It is a decidedly streamlined dress, with crisp straight-edges that run their course to the dropped-down waistline. Keeping in tradition, and in anticipation of the atmospheric conditions of some of the hottest late night clubs and cabarets, the dress is sleeveless, and would be laced with microfibres that might allow the wearer breathability.

© Raina-Clair Gillis

The phrase "the bee's knees" is a slang term which means something is really wonderful, the height of excellence. It became popular in the U.S. in the 1920s, otherwise known as the Roaring Twenties. When I saw this costume at the store something about the stripes reminded me of old style swim suits, silent movies and Gatsby. I did a bit of styling to the costume, hair and make-up to make it what, in my mind, fit that very interesting era in terms of values, ideas, art, entertainment and fashion.

for our daily challenge - yesteryear
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Nikon D7000 ~ Nikkor 105mm f2.5 Ai ~ 1/50 sec. ~ ISO Speed 100

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ROARING TWENTIES - DVD Movie

Three doughboys--played by James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, and Jeffrey Lynn--meet in a foxhole in Europe just as World War I is ending. When they return to the States, they are forgotten men, and after Eddie (Cagney) tries in vain to get his old job back, his pal Danny (Frank McHugh) lets him drive his cab at night. A fare asks unwitting Eddie to deliver bootleg liquor, but Prohibition is in full swing and Eddie is arrested and thrown in the slammer. Gallant Eddie won't rat out the woman to whom he delivered the hooch, speakeasy owner Panama Smith, (whiskey-voiced Gladys George). She bails him out and carries a torch for him for the rest of the movie, but he only has eyes for sweet little Jean (Priscilla Lane). Panama introduces Eddie to a life of crime, staking him in the bootleg business. Eddie's grit and bluster suit him perfectly for this existence, and he's soon a success, so he hires Army buddy Lloyd (Lynn) as consigliere, then teams up with George (Bogart), a liquor smuggler who plays a much dirtier game. Racketeering and murder are his methods, and he drags Eddie down with him. When Prohibition ends and the stock market crashes, Eddie loses everything and takes to the bottle himself.
The film is a bit schematic. The three stars are archetypes: Cagney the good boy gone bad, Bogart the bad boy who stays bad, and Lynn the good boy who stays good. Still, it packs quite an emotional wallop--Cagney shows extraordinary range, going from green boy to swaggering gangster to broken man, and Bogart has rarely seemed more purely evil than he does here. He kills for the sheer pleasure of it; it's truly frightening to see. The final scene is a stunning shootout between Cagney and Bogart. With lesser actors this film could be pure hokum. With Cagney and Bogart, it attains catharsis. --Laura Mirsky