The Flapper Era: Flat-Chested Fashion and the Binder Bra
Poets involved
What happened
The 1920s flapper aesthetic, centred in New York, Chicago, London, and Paris, demanded a radically different female silhouette: flat-chested, boyishly slim, with no defined waist. Women adopted breast binders or flat brassières to achieve the fashionable look, and the corset was now almost entirely absent from fashionable dress. The flapper's physical style was accompanied by new social freedoms — smoking, drinking, dancing, voting — that constituted a dramatic break from Victorian bodily ideals.
Literary impact
The Jazz Age and the Harlem Renaissance produced some of the most vital feminist and racially conscious poetry in American history, from Edna St. Vincent Millay to Langston Hughes. Millay's frank celebration of female sexuality and physical freedom was directly related to the new bodily autonomy the era offered; her poetry was read alongside illustrations of flappers in popular magazines. The flat-chested ideal was also contested by Black women poets of the Harlem Renaissance who had different bodily experiences of beauty standards.
Source: Wikipedia
