Clara Bow: The Rise and Fall of the Fashionable Flapper
It is happening tomorrow. Come see us at Modes of Modernity, an event organized by FIT’s Fashion and Textiles Studies program. Here is still another illustration of the kind of research students will produce. You clearly want to not miss it. Since the event is public and free, come along and bring a friend.
By the middle of the 1920s, Clara Bow (1905–1965) was a Hollywood cinema star. Though her lifestyle, so innovative at the time of her freshly burgeoning film career, grew antiquated as it entered the early 1930s, Bow was the epitome of the zeitgeist of the decade, a “flapper, a modern young woman pushing limits of expected feminine dress and manner.”
Not long after winning Motion Picture Magazine’s Fame and Fortune sweepstakes, Bow fled Brooklyn’s slums for Hollywood. Bow had a modest role in Beyond the Rainbow (1922). She dropped into the new way of life that involved regular reveling, living in the moment, and the unfettered expression of sexuality including many boyfriends and lovers rather than a single, protective husband.
Though maybe none more so than It (1927), which drew large numbers of viewers and confirmed Bow’s reputation as the ideal flapper, her persona radiated through her films.
Though the fashions of the moment shaped her short hemlines, wild red hair, range of hats and flowing head scarves, both on and off film, her star power also greatly affected the flapper image itself. Bow’s energetic, carefree attitude and genuine, flowing acting style drew numerous fans. She was the silent movie It Girl, remarkably unlike the actresses of earlier generations.
The tastes of movie viewers changed when the Great Depression replaced the Jazz Age. Originally thought to be fascinating on and off screen, Bow came to be considered as extreme, reckless, and completely passé. Parallel with the early 1930s development of “talkie” film technology, these developments rejuvenated a fresh view of what it meant to be a modern woman.
Bow’s career ran just 1922 to 1933, yet during that time she made fifty-seven pictures, fifteen features in 1925 alone, and she created a lasting effect in an eleven-year period before her thrilling, modern lifestyle became obsolete. This essay will follow Clara Bow’s growth and decline as a modern emblem of the 1920s and investigate her career and age of influence.
Before arriving at FIT, Danielle J. Morrin interned at Winterthur Museum following her B.P.S. in Fashion Merchandising from Marist College. She completed Advanced Conservation I but is now concentrating on curatorial studies.
She interned in the Costume Institute’s Collections Management Department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Wardrobe and Calvin Klein’s Collections Management Department, and the Curatorial Dept. at Museum at FIT. She is interning in the Curatorial Department of the Costume Institute and is among the curators of the student-run exhibit Beyond Rebellion: Fashioning the Biker Jacket this spring.
