1914 - 1929 The Modernist World Jump to:
1914 - 1929 The Modernist World Jump to:
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As the war overtook the United States, a significant economic struggle surfaced in musical entertainment. In the 1920s appropriation and assirnilation of black culture continued; the blandness of Whiteman's music seemed more comfortable, staking out a neutral ground amid the furore. We have seen Whiteman deliver the music of his day from the ignominious rôle of obsequious hanger-on of the fashionable world and make it a universal thing. Read More
Then there was Prohibition, the policy which made the manufacture, sale and consumption of alcoholic drinks illegal throughout the twenties.F. Scott Fitzgerald's familiar phrase, the Jazz Age, summed up the spirit of the period; Prohibition was the most patent symbol of its lifestyle. Read More
The object of condemnation, collectively known as jazz, included various related styles: the "raggy" music of white New Orleans musicians such as the Original Dixieland Jazz Band and their imitators (music that was itself a limited imitation of the black music most closely associated with the Crescent City), the syncopated dance bands, the Charleston craze, the songs of George Gershwin or Irving Berlin, and the... Read More
Black blues singers emerged in the early twentieth century as popular and powerful celebrities. They were urban, secular singers who turned their rich experiences into social lessons for their audiences. They were usually bolder than white women singers. Performing before exclusively black audiences, they discussed sexual disappointments and the failures of love with great candor. Read More
The white audience was also far from homogeneous. "Hillbilly" music began to be recorded in 1923, and again surprised the record industry by showing that there was a market for the distinctive regional styles of white America. The music of non-English language groups also began to be recorded. The social effects of these developments were complex, but the hostility of the poorer, often fundamentalist rural communities to urban culture was to some extent deflected by this opportunity to become consumers of their own... Read More
Although the fashions gaining ground before World War I prefigured the "modernism" of the 1920s, it was only in the hedonism and boom atmosphere of the Jazz Age that the revolution in women' s dothing begun before 1914 was finally accomplished.
The wartime experience of young European women from the middle and upper classes in situations where they could no longer constantly be chaperoned, and the casualty toll that devastated a whole generation of young men, meant that with the dawn of the 1920s a new kind of single woman - independent, self-sufficient, adventurous - stepped on to the social stage. Read More
At this period Chanel' s designs were for the leisured rich, the new international set who traveled Europe and the United States in a restless search for seasonal diversions; and the irony of her fashions was that she gave the richest women in the world a look that was indistinguishable from that of a shop girl or office worker.
Dressed in this ultra-chic "poor look" - in a sirnple black dress either with a demure white Peter Pan collar, or, more likely, completely unadomed - the society women who affected it paid everything for a fashion that looked like... Read More
Chanel's collaboration with the Parisian artistic avant garde had been much more successful. As early as 1922 she worked with Jean Codeau, Picasso and the composer Arthur Honegger on a production of the classical Greek play Antigone; and from 1923 to 1927 she worked with Sergei Diaghilev and Codeau on ballet designs. Read More
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