Maybelline Added Sex Appeal During the 1920's

The horrors of the Great War lead to sex appeal in the 1920's and advertisers capitalized on it.

The 1920's were the beginning, of liberation for women, from being thought of as child-bearers and homemakers. to co-equals with men in society.

It was the first decade to emphasize youth culture over the older generations Civil War mentality.

Young people began testing their new boundaries with more and more outrageous forms of behavior, as fast cars, short skirts and free thinking changed the rules of the game. 

Bathing suits in 1929, were made for board-thin, young figured women, who wanted total liberation, for their body as well as their mind.

Here is a photo, of my great aunt Bunny at 25, at Lake Zurich, Chicago, showing off, the art of looking feminine yet liberated, in 1929.  All these wonderful, vintage photos are from her, 83 year old album. I was lucky enough to get copies, before she died at 90 years of age.  

The Jazz Age represented, restlessness, idolization of youth, and dissatisfaction with the status quo.

My great aunt Bunny, on the right, (Nana's younger sister,) was 25 in this photo, and was beginning to develop a more womanly figure.  Fashion in the 1920's, was especially designed for girls with no breasts, hips or body fat.  Girls began to look like boys and boys like girls. 

"[The flapper] symbolized an age anxious to enjoy itself, anxious to forget the past, anxious to ignore the future." (from Jacques Chastenet, "Europe in the Twenties" in Purnell's History of the Twentieth Century)

Young women in the 1920s, didn't want the drudgery of social conventions and routine of daily life.  Of Course, the Film industry and Maybelline helped shape this idea.

Fashion and Maybelline, in the late 1920's appealed to the modern woman who wanted liberation from a repressive Victorian  past.

Single and married women in the cities and the country came to enjoy the comfort and ease, of the new relaxed style in fashion and eye make-up, that were once considered, for Flappers only.      

Advertising helped shape a new identity for the Jazz Age, generation - making it sexy, for both men and women to smoke, drink out of a flask and have the power to spend on anything they wanted, even if they didn't need it

Tom Lyle Williams shaped the new image, for a liberated woman in the 1920s, when he contracted Clara Bow and Louise Brooks, to infuse glamour intoMaybelline advertisements. 

Sharrie Williams on Good Morning Arizona