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Full title: Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern. This book was awesome fun and I learned a ton about flappers and the 1920s.
The author describes in a clear and understandable way how the 1920s gave us the first modern advertising plans, which I found fascinating. Before WWI, product advertisements were about the facts. After, product advertisements were about the consumer--your hopes and dreams and how the product can make you reach them. This is the era when we first had ad copy like "Boys love a slender girl" or "Will he pity you as an otherwise pretty girl ruined by blemishes?" Ads first started to prey on the consumer's fears, and as a result, cosmetic sales skyrocketed in just a few years. And ads picked up the character of the flapper and marketed her as someone desirable to become, largely because they could sell more stuff that way--flappers needed the right clothes, the right lipstick, the right cigarettes, and more.
A lot of other things contributed to the rise of the flapper--the population shift from rural to urban life, more single women living on their own and making their own money, the rise of a middle class. Zeitz puts it all together as a cultural snapshot, and includes portraits of the famous names of the era: Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Coco Chanel, Clara Bow, and others who made the flapper the icon of the era. A really well done book, highly recommended for anyone interested in US history or women's history.
The author describes in a clear and understandable way how the 1920s gave us the first modern advertising plans, which I found fascinating. Before WWI, product advertisements were about the facts. After, product advertisements were about the consumer--your hopes and dreams and how the product can make you reach them. This is the era when we first had ad copy like "Boys love a slender girl" or "Will he pity you as an otherwise pretty girl ruined by blemishes?" Ads first started to prey on the consumer's fears, and as a result, cosmetic sales skyrocketed in just a few years. And ads picked up the character of the flapper and marketed her as someone desirable to become, largely because they could sell more stuff that way--flappers needed the right clothes, the right lipstick, the right cigarettes, and more.
A lot of other things contributed to the rise of the flapper--the population shift from rural to urban life, more single women living on their own and making their own money, the rise of a middle class. Zeitz puts it all together as a cultural snapshot, and includes portraits of the famous names of the era: Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Coco Chanel, Clara Bow, and others who made the flapper the icon of the era. A really well done book, highly recommended for anyone interested in US history or women's history.
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Date: 2008-09-03 03:33 am (UTC)From:this sounds like an awesome book!
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Date: 2008-09-03 03:55 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2008-09-03 02:49 pm (UTC)From: