With shimmer, 1920s fashion exhibit displays influencers’ power

They had been danced in, sweat on, spritzed with perfume and maybe even survived a spilled illicit drink or two in a Prohibition-era speak-easy.

Two glittering flapper party dresses restored by a Cornell student and other historic Cornell pieces now on display demonstrate how 1920s influencers - including Cornell faculty members - helped create societal shifts that allowed women to claim more freedom and control of how they lived, dressed and presented themselves in society.

More than 60 items from the Cornell Fashion and Textile Collection in the College of Human Ecology (CHE) make up over 75% of the exhibit "Influencers: 1920s fashion and the New Woman" at Lyndhurst Mansion in Tarrytown, New York.

The "Waterfall Dress" - a slinky silk slip dress with elaborate sequins and at least 100 strands of beads falling from a curved seam between the shoulder blades - was painstakingly restored by Lila Frost '25, a fashion design major, in the fall semester of her sophomore year. A photo of the piece, donated by Bruce '65 and Judith Eissner and worn by Bruce Eissner's mother, is shown on the back cover of the exhibit's catalogue.

"It's a very skimpy dress, even by today's standards," said Denise Green '07, associate professor of human centered design (CHE) and director of the Cornell Fashion and Textile Collection. "Post-World War I, post-Spanish flu pandemic, people were out partying and having a great time dancing and drinking and breaking all the fashion rules that had preceeded.

"It was a revolutionary fashion moment, which you can trace through the hemline. The hemlines gradually getting shorter from the late 1910s through the mid-20s. You would have never seen a woman's ankles 10 to 15 years before."

The Waterfall Dress had suffered from what is known as silk shatter, an irreversible degradation of fabric from the metallic salts formerly used in textile manufacturing, and had been stored in an acid-free box lying flat to reduce further damage damage. "It was literally hanging by threads. Lila did a meticulous job" at restoring it, said Catherine Blumenkamp, associate director of the collection, who oversaw Frost's work. The piece weighs between 5 and 10 pounds, she said. "It's really very delicate but it's quite complex."

Frost spent several months reinforcing the silk with conservation-grade nylon, restringing the strands of beads, and replicating the damaged sequin design. "It could be nerve-wracking at first when I picked it up and beads would tumble to the floor and then I would hope I hadn't lost any under the table," said Frost, who had experience with hand-sewing and repair at a Baltimore atelier since she was 12. "It was an intense conservation challenge, but I really enjoyed it. It was a privilege to work with these artifacts."

Frost also restored a 1920s seafoam green dress with Art Deco beadwork, donated by Laurie Berke-Weiss '71. She recreated the design using beads that had collected at the bottom of the storage box.

Those pieces are examples of how the new medium of silent films spread major fashion change in the 1920s. "The glimmer and glitz that we associate with the 1920s picks up really nicely on silver nitrate film," Green said. "And then film enables us to see garments in motion. The Victorian corset restricted movement making those kinds of silhouettes are far less compelling."

By the 1920s, a new emphasis on physical education counteracted the Victorian ideals that kept women immobilized by their clothing. The suffrage movement was also at play, as well as the celebratory period following World War I and the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic. And rayon, the first human-made fiber, made of cellulose, enabled a cheaper version of silk's shimmer. "And so you have a perfect storm of for a totally new kind of fashion that enables movement, is visually stimulating, and empowers women to have fun," Green said.

The silhouettes of the pieces are simple, Blumenkamp said, "but the embellishment and surface design really gives them the most visual interest." And they sometimes serve a functional purpose, to contribute to the way the garment drapes. "So it's both decorative but also functional, affecting the movement."

The movie star Irene Castle, who starred in silent films made in Ithaca, helped habituate viewers to seeing a woman wear bifurcated clothing like the jodhpurs of riding habits and swimming costumes, with shorts and a larger skirt over them. "Just in the way that silent films started to normalize women being seen in makeup, it also starts to habituate people to seeing women in pants and trousers and doing physical activities," Green said.

Cornell faculty members Flora Rose and Martha van Rensselaer both contributed to the freedoms that emerged in this era. They helped to found what was then the New York State College of Home Economics - now CHE - and democratize access to education for women across New York state, including Indigenous women. They recruited international students as well. "They really make the '…any person… any study' idea come to life through the accessibility that the College of Home Economics provided to women," Green said.

The collection loaned a gray satin dress that Van Rensselaer wore in 1923 to meet the queen of Belgium, who awarded her several medals after she had helped rebuild the libraries in that country after they were destroyed during World War I. She traveled with Rose, who had done a major nutritional study of children in Belgium after the war, to understand the impact of the war on children's health through nutrition, Green said.

"The idea of the influencer goes beyond the trope of what we think of today to include educational influencers like Flora Rose, Martha Van Rensselaer, and the founder of our collection, Beulah Blackmore. These early women academic pioneers were trailblazers and trendsetters."

The exhibit is open through Sept. 23.