Fashion Meets Literature, Part Two: The Great Gatsby

"The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored ballon. They were booth in white and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few minutes listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the roan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor."

From the Roaring Twenties- inspired SS12 collections of Ralph Lauren and Tory Burch, to the Woody Allen film Midnight in Paris of this year, to the impending Gatsby film due Christmas Day of next year, to the continuous inspiration that the risquely sheer, revealing drop-waist dresses and the charming little hats of the Gatzbian era gives the runway; the 1920s have been a constant inspiration in fashion and life. My great- grandmother reached the height of her adolescence in the Roaring Twenties, and several diaphanous lace confections, all of a kind, a low-waisted sack of a thing, shockingly sheer, with delicate hand-embroidery and hand- beading with tiny freshwater pearls; all have been left as heirlooms for me.
The pictoral idea behind the flapper, was a woman, enlightened and free from all the constraints applied to her in society (embodied by Kate Chopin's heroines in her novels), open to all sexual freedoms, free to shorten their translucent hems, chop off the hair which had been collecting on their head for the past decade, and wear red lipstick and smoke; all freeing the woman who had been restrained. In this passage, the "two young women," Daisy and Jordan, are symbolically "floating" in Nick Carraway's eyes, carelessly floating throughout the air, their white dresses flapping. Tom, emblematically, slams the window shut, constricting the freedom of Daisy (which foreshadows her later affair with Gatsby.)