Saturday, November 21, 2009

Body, Environment & Dress: Women's Fashion in the 1920s









A)
Pictures above showing the dress practice.


B)
The people involved in the dress practice I am looking at are women. The what factor of my dress practice is the events of 1920s and the role that women’s fashion played. Women workers went on strike, and women’s rights became a big part of the 20s. Also prohibition was taking place in the United States during the 20s. The when is the time period of the 1920s. I am mostly focusing on the dress practice in the United States regarding women’s fashion but have looked at other countries. What was interesting was that fashion was a big part of the culture at the time because it was a very drastic change. Women didn’t stick with corsets and restricting themselves. Their dress changed to long silhouette styles of dress, with short hair (the bob), long flowing jewelry. The dress played a significant role as women changed history.

C)
Certain things stand out to me as I have researched women’s fashion of the 1920s. Those things are the haircut referred to as the “bob,” the long flowing kind of pencil like dresses, then the jewelry. In the classification system the “bob” haircut can be in the shape & structure box in the fact that it shaped women’s faces. It also could fit under texture because not all the “bob” haircuts were alike some were curly, wavy, or straight. I would classify the dress worn by women in the 20s as an attachment to body enclosures and that it would fall under the volume/proportion category. It modified the proportion of women’s bodies as well as giving off a certain type of volume. Now the jewelry mostly the long flowing beaded necklaces women wore would be classified as an enclosure of the body, a wrapped enclosure. In my opinion it could fall under a lot of the categories such as volume/proportion, shape & structure, as well as surface design.

D)
One of Sheldon’s somatotypes of the body can describe perfectly what type of woman was participating in the dress practice of the 1920s. That type would be ectomorphic which is linear and slender. That was the type of woman as well as the objective of the dress practice of the 1920s. Certain forces can be attributed to why woman were ectomorphic at the time. During the 20s some people couldn’t really afford to eat, some women in protest refused to eat in order for women’s rights and food wasn’t necessarily very important. I don’t think the body was a canvas for the dress however it was more like a frame where the dress would just fall into place perfectly on the woman. It was around this time when the importance of cooking and making food started to come into play in a woman’s life. However woman were still slender because certain bad nutritional forces has yet to make their debut in society.

E)
Lots of things influenced this dress practice; climate, environment and occupation are certainly some factors. The dress practice came about because of the environment woman were in. It was a way for them to stand out, a way for them to get noticed while they were changing history. The layer of dress would be a two layer dress. The woman didn’t bundle up with this dress however on occasion wore the fur coats or other types of coats that complimented the silhouette designs of their dresses. This dress practice was also influenced by a woman’s occupation in society. They didn’t want to stand out anymore they wanted to be treated like the men (woman’s right to vote). Wearing corsets in this environment wasn’t working for woman, what did work was this dress practice because it got people to notice.

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