Yes, Flapper Style Is Back—Just Ask Rihanna

You can guess where this is going: With the vaccines making Covid somewhat more manageable (at least at the time the fall 2021 collections were conceived) and the strong appeal of a centennial tie-in, designers have revived the 1920s party dress.

The prevailing silhouette of the ’20s was a body-skimming tube, which is another reason for the allure of this style: It’s that pleasant combination of aesthetically pleasing and comfortable. Designers, however, have not resurrected the look of the era so much as limned it for inspiration, updating period details like low-cut backs (at Khaite), gleaming pale silk (at Fendi), and more-is-good embellishments like beading and sequins (at Julie de Libran).

“My color this season is sparkle!” said Ms. de Libran. “Women have been saying, ‘I can’t wait to put on a dress.’ We want light and shimmer, we want to bring back our happy moods, even if it’s at home for dinner. We need it.”

Much as we may delight in frocks that shimmer on the dance floor, just as the women of the 1920s did, what we can’t share with them is how liberating those airy dresses felt. It was a time of acute generational tension, with society’s elders decrying the loose morals of the young in articles like the indignant “Unspeakable Jazz Must Go!” which appeared in the Ladies’ Home Journal in 1921. The matrons who read the LHJ had grown up rigidly corseted and swathed in multiple layers. Their daughters wore next to nothing. Under her lightweight dress, the modern miss wore a bra and briefs and perhaps a gossamer slip. The most daring might eschew even that; at dances on hot summer nights in Montgomery, Ala., a young Zelda Sayre would slip off her underwear and ask her date to keep it in his pocket for her.

Ms. Sayre, who would marry Mr. Fitzgerald, was the archetypal flapper, a term that has ballooned to encompass every woman who bobbed her hair in the decade following the Volstead Act. In fact, “flapper” was already in use in the 1910s, to denote gawky teenage girls. By the ’20s, the word had evolved to describe convention-defying young women who drank, smoked, bared their knees and made out with their admirers. The flapper was personified on-screen by the It Girl, Clara Bow, “it” being a euphemism for sex appeal. But “flapper” and “fashion” are not synonymous. Describing a hat she thought in questionable taste, the New Yorker’s fashion critic Lois Long wrote that it made women look “unpleasantly flapperish.”

Ms. Long may not have aspired to flapper style, but she was up for a night out. She later described the epoch’s hard-partying ways with nonchalance: “You were thought to be good at holding your liquor in those days if you could make it to the ladies’ room before throwing up. It was customary to give two dollars to the cab driver if you threw up in his cab.”

The acceptance of such uninhibited behavior (and clothing) for women was indicative of powerful social changes—this was a decade in which suffragists won the right to vote in countries around the world. Those trim little chemises, however, did not last. Hemlines dropped in 1929, not because of the stock market crash but because designers decided it was time for a change. It was not until the 1960s, another decade obsessed with youth, that the short shift would look right again.

As the pandemic drags on, the party dress is, as Ms. de Libran correctly intuited, an element of our collective fantasy of celebration. That designers chose to channel it through the prism of the 1920s is not just a result of the centennial but because no other decade embodies madcap, swinging-from-the-chandeliers exuberance quite like it. As Lorna Hall, the director of fashion intelligence at the trend forecaster WGSN, put it, “The 1920s are a tried and trusted period for escapist fantasies and I think that’s what this is, a desire for escape. Because for most of us parties are not reality yet.”

Try On the 1920s for Size—in 2021

These dresses take flapper-y elements—like lace or a dropped waist—and make them feel fresh.

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