How To Dress Like A Flapper

Hi, my name's Alexia and I'm a fashion stylist. I'm here in the heart of East London at the Pattern Market. This area is one of Britain's trendiest areas, there are a lot of fashion designers and people who are heavily industry related.

So let's go inside and I'll show you some things on how to dress. We're going to talk about flapper girl style. Flapper girls were the dancers of the 1920's and 30's.

The sort of icon would Josephine Baker who danced and danced the night away to a lot of jazz music in the 20's and 30's. The sort of style that she wore which many girls emulate now especially in fancy dress parties and special occasions is the flapper style, and that usually ends up being a dress very similar to this particular shape. It's a very simple cut, there's no darting or anything but they usually have rows and rows of either beads, tasselling and things at the bottom of the sew which end up flapping or jiggling when you dance.

This one's a style – this is for a larger girl, and this goes to show that you can be any size to wear this particular style. This one's quite a large one actually, in the vintage store, but it's covered in sequins here. They're usually quite glitzy because it's quite – jazz music dancing in those ages was about the kind of limelight and being on display.

It's usually got a low slant tassel here, which comes just below the waist and lots of tasselled fringing so that when you move, it shakes like this. Flappers usually have a headband and beads. Lots of them like to wear strings of pearls layered up together.

It's all about jewelry and anything that jingles. Accessorizing for flapper girls are usually things like the headband which goes around the forehead, straight to the back. Some of them have a feather at the back of the head or feather at the front with the jewel.

Red lipstick is usually the rigor with lots of heavy eyelash makeup and red lips. The final touches for the flapper girl style is often the smoking stick, I don't have one here to show you but I'm sure that you're all aware what one of those are. The smoking holder can be 2 or 3 inches or it can be about 6 inches long, and you have your cigarette in the end, and that's generally the flapper girl style. .