Come to the Fenton History Center and see the small exhibit of some of our collection of 1920s-era “dancing dresses.” There’s one in the foyer, one in the drawing room, a couple in the lake room and one more somewhere in the building.

The dress in the foyer is an “Alice” blue gown. This particular color of blue was a favorite of President Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter, Alice, and was named after her. The dress is fashioned out of three types of lace, point d’esprit, re-embroidered and Chantilly. It is sleeveless, with a “V” neckline, a dropped waistline and a flared skirt to swing out while dancing. This gown is part of the Mr. and Mrs. Stanley Gottlieb Collection at the museum.

The gown in the drawing room is dated March 1925. It is a black, silk velvet evening gown, trimmed with a rhinestone flower and leaf decoration on the left side. Its neckline and armseye are bound with black silk crepe, and it too has a dropped waistline. It was a gift to the museum from Helen E. Weaver, who stated that it had been worn at the inaugural ball of President Calvin Coolidge.

The tubular look became the 1920s ideal. Skirts were much diminished in fullness. The waistlines lowered to the hips. Skirts were becoming much shorter than previously and the “flapper” era had arrived. Fashion was changing in response to women’s changing lifestyles. Women were much more active and the long, full skirts of the first part of the 20th century were impeding their movements. They were now climbing in and out of automobiles, gardening in the mud and playing golf in all weather, leaving the bottoms of the long, full skirts muddy and shredded. The dresses of the early 20th century required a “wasteful” amount of fabric and were time consuming and tedious to make and more toil in keeping them clean and mended were arguments in favor of the shorter dresses. Time was saved in the fitting of the 1920s fashion and the ease of laundering the simple, modern clothes also was noted.

Girls wrote in to newspapers in defense of the new fashions that those who work and earn their own living should determine their own mode of dressing without “preachments” from males. It was not dress reformers who brought about the change; it was these fun-loving, younger American women who were working for wages. The style spread across the country and the manufacturing and retail establishments who bent under the force of public desire.

By the 1920s, women had discarded corsets and the hour-glass figure for underwear that produced a boyish silhouette. They bobbed their hair, raised their skirt hems to their knees, rolled down their stockings and wore makeup. Dresses could slip over the head without any fastening, which became a universal aspect of women’s fashion.

This fashion was scandalous to many people. Short skirts were denounced from the pulpit. The Archbishop of Naples announced that the recent earthquake in Amalfi was due to God’s anger about a skirt which reached no further than the knee.

State legislatures passed laws like the Utah bill, which imposed a fine and imprisonment for those who wore short skirts on the streets, skirts higher than 3 inches above the ankle. A bill introduced in the Ohio Legislature sought to prohibit any female over 14 years of age from wearing “a skirt which does not reach that part of the foot known as the instep.”

It was all in vain. A new type of woman had come into existence. Girls worked to look more like boys and curves were abandoned in favor of slender figures. By the end of the 1920s a new style was emerging with somewhat longer skirts, but not back to the lengths before 1920.

Come to the museum and check out the dresses on display they won’t be on display for too much longer.