The Fashion and Textile Museum is bringing us a treat this winter with the new exhibition ‘Night and Day: 1930s Fashion and Photographs’. It promises to showcase the most influential day and evening fashions of the iconic decade, alongside photographs of them being worn by all the stars. One hundred ensembles will span nine defining themes that present the variety of 1930s lifestyle and aims to bring this era of great social change into the spotlight. With the glory of the Jazz Age burning on its heels and the prospect of war looming overhead it’s easy to forget how stylish these years were. The 1920s brought us the flapper girl with her fishy silhouettes and shining shoes, perfectly memorialized by F. Scott Fitzgerald describing a young Joan Crawford, “the girl you see in smart night clubs, gowned to the apex of sophistication, toying iced glasses with a remote, faintly bitter expression, dancing deliciously, laughing a great deal, with wide, hurt eyes. Young things with a talent for living.” But the flapper had tragically died with the great Wall Street crash in 1929 and even our beloved Joanie grew up from little Lucile to the Crawford we now know and adore. Girls became women and adopted floor length satin gowns, cinched waists and volume in the sleeves and shoulders. The party had ended but glamour was born. And we do love us some glamour. The exhibition will also include snapshots of daily life that depict how people dressed in the time when suburbia was booming. Style adapts as it always does but this time bringing us the rise of the department store, the floral day dress and the revolutionary acceptance of women wearing trousers. Shock, horror! So dahlings it’s time to trade in your pumps for a pair of heels and teeter towards the exhibition, opening October 12. You’re welcome.
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