Joyeux Anniversaire, Josephine Baker!

The extraordinary 1920s singer and dancer Josephine Baker was born this day over a century ago.  To celebrate her birthday in vintage style we're recounting a few fashionable anecdotes about this glorious diva.

She was born in poverty in St Louis, Missouri, and despite her alluring talent, American audiences in the Great Gatsby era were not ready for an African American to dominate the stage like she could.  The French, however, loved Josephine's je ne sais quoi and upon her debut in Paris, she was an instant and incredible star.

 By the mid-1920s Josephine and a few other entertainers, like her red-haired friend Bricktop, ruled the Paris stages.  This meant lavish living and exotic luxuries few people could afford.  Bricktop remembers:

 

"All the great designers - Paul Poiret, Edward Molyneux, Jean Patou - were fighting to dress her.  She had an apartment right around the corner from my nightclub, and one day I went there and the clothes were just piled high on the floor, and I said, 'Josephine, why don't you hang these clothes up?' 'Oh, no, Brickie,' she said, 'they are going to take them away tomorrow and bring another pile.'"

 

And indeed the couturiers did.  Even the great Paul Poiret, at this point struggling to keep clients, was willing to dress Josephine for free.  Her influence was so great that, according to her friend Caroline Reagan, Josephine panned Poiret's designs during a fashion show, and instead sketched out a pink fringed ombre`design she desired.  Poiret immediately incorporated the 'Josephine Baker dress' into his next collection.

  

And at an evening dinner, one reporter relayed that Josephine arrived in a "cherry-colored dress, small hat pulled low on her forehead, ermine-trimmed coat.  'Paris is marvelous', she gushes.  'And your dressmakers are divine.'"

Yet in her memoirs, decades after the fame and fashion had faded, Josephine assures us that after all, "love dresses you better than all the dressmakers".  

We agree Josephine, and we love you... Joyeux Anniversaire!

Reference: Josephine Baker: The Hungry Heart by Jean-Claude Baker and Chris Chase

Dressing Great Gatsby Style

As The Great Gatsby debuts on-screen, vintage vixens far and wide will be craving flapper looks in the coming seasons.  Already their presence is seen on the runway, where rugby style stripes are pairing with fluid, femme Gatsby style jerseys.

Au Revoir by Georges Barbier, 1924.

The look was pioneered by Gatsby's fictional flappers and real-life fashionistas of the 1920s.  Everyone from the forward-thinking local gal to the haute designer Coco Chanel was wearing their hair short and their dresses high (though Coco couldn't bear to bare her own knees, or anyone else's, in her fashion collections).

Regardless of Coco's decorum, she and the rest of 1920s fashion offered us worthy looks we're inspired by.  And sometimes inspiration is all we can take from some garments of this era.  Because the 1920s were nearly a century ago, original 1920s clothing is often fragile (read: unwearable) but take heart, there are flapper looks made in later decades. 

Also, it's often easier to shop 20s jewelry and flapper accessories like long strings of beads and the ever-chic 1920s cloche hat.  Beautiful flapper finds both antique and recent can be had at vintage clothing shops, and the varied looks, from Deco to darling, are simply the bee's knees.  Here's a profile of our favorite looks:

Flapper Afternoon

The Sporting Look

Evening Drama

Vintage fashion has graciously copied motifs from the classic flapper era and reworked them time and again, most notably with the premiere of 1959 film Some Like It Hot with Marilyn Monroe and through the mid-1960s. We offer a variety of clothes not only from the 1920s, but reprised decades later and still reminiscent of 20s flapper style finds.

Until next time, Vixens... 23-skidoo!