"The era of wonderful nonsense," as the newspaper columnist Westbrook Pegler later dubbed it. A dizzy, giddy time of petting parties, bootleg gin, jazz, and flappers. When movie tickets and coffee cost a dime, trolley rides cost a nickel (the same as hot dogs or hamburgers), newspapers cost two cents, and sliced bread was regarded as the greatest thing ever.
The setting of many an Agatha Christie mystery, this is one decade that absolutely lives up to the popular stereotypes and then some. The Great War was over and (most of) the Western world had never been so prosperous! And this prosperity meant it was time to par-tay! And none too soon, either — after four long, miserable years of trench warfare and a flu pandemic that had killed around 100 million people, just about everybody needed cheering up.
Style was almost exclusively Art Deco moderne, all minimalist lines and coolly fluid shapes. And there were plenty of additional opportunities for employing that style, in the many new consumer appliances that came on the market. Electric refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, fans, toasters, radios, phonographs, and other gadgets were sold by the millions, with installment plans allowing more people than ever to buy them. And automobiles, no longer referred to as "horseless carriages," stopped being playthings mainly used for Sunday rides and instead became a wanted everyday commodity, pretty much helped by their wartime use, the same as with "flying machines" and "air balloons" (the latter of which would, unfortunately, have a tragic end in mainstream terms late in the following decade).
In the style department, women's skirts were shorter, and so was their hair. Bobbed hair had actually emerged earlier, around 1915, and was popularized during the late 1910s out of convenience during the aforementioned Great War, as well as through the earlier 1920s. Hemlines gradually rose from ankle to calf-length during the war, and to knee-length by 1925. (You would see these styles again in the "mod" mid-1960s Carnaby Street era.) Hosiery and high heels were thus on display, and younger women sometimes rolled down the tops of their stockings and applied rouge to their knees. Despite those costumes you buy these days, most dresses were not fringednote or figure-hugging,note while above-the-knee hemlines were nonexistent for grown women at any time. Dresses had boxy and boyish silhouettes featuring dropped waists, and were minimally or highly decorated depending on the occasion. Since all of this was handmade, you'd pay a lot more for a fancier outfit. Tiered ruffles were also popular.note Women's hat styles included a head-hugging shape known as a cloché (after the French word for "bell").
Characters included gangsters and G-men, flappers and their "sheiks" (sort of proto-metrosexual young males — the name comes from The Sheik), languid white movie idols, jolly black jazz singers and dancers, and lots of cheery collegiate types who wore oversized fur coats, straw hats, and wide "Oxford bags" (flared trousers) while strumming on ukuleles, dancing the Charleston, and shouting "23 skidoo!" People sat on flagpoles and swallowed live goldfish, and stunt men swung golf clubs and played tennis while standing atop airplanes in flight. The basic idea was to shock, amaze and amuse at all costs; there were apparently some women of the era who would greet their guests in the bath.
The fun and excitement were only heightened by the fact that much of it was totally illegal, at least in the USA. There Prohibition was in full swing, so gin was made in bathtubs, smuggled by the likes of Al Capone and served in 'speakeasies', hole-in-the-wall bars highly prone to raids by stolid, humourless cops, or an ambush by the eccentric Izzy and Moe prohibition agent team in disguise. Hip flasks were handy for taking your booze along for the ride, and the mixers in cocktails would take the edge off the cheap stuff. Unless you were Treasury Agent Eliot Ness or one of his elite team of incorruptible agents, The Untouchables, you needed to be extra cautious to never insult a tough-looking Italian in a sharp suit, lest you find yourself looking down the barrel of a Tommy Gun (and some of those Jewish and Irish guys were no pushovers, either).
However, this growth of the influence of modern life in urbanized northern states ran headlong into more conservative communities (especially in the south) which tried to keep modern ideas like the theory of evolution out of their schools. The state of Tennessee tried to do so with the Butler Act, which banned evolution from school curriculums. The small town of Dayton, suffering from an economic slump, took advantage of this and persuaded the local teacher, John Scopes, to be indicted under this law in order to have a big publicity trial to bring in the tourists. The plan worked perfectly, and the resulting "Monkey Trial" (as journalist and satirist H. L. Mencken famously dubbed it) proved to be one of the most dramatic and publicized of the century, with the confrontation between the noted populist leader and religious conservative William Jennings Bryan and the famed defense lawyer and noted agnostic Clarence Darrow being the highlight of the event. As it happens, the prosecution's win was never seriously in doubt, but the victory was a Pyrrhic one for religious fundamentalists, with Bryan being publicly embarrassed by Darrow's questioning that forced him to concede that a literal interpretation of the Bible was indefensible; Bryan died less than a week later. (The trial would later be immortalized, albeit with certain dramatic liberties taken, by the classic play Inherit the Wind and its subsequent film adaptations.)
Meanwhile, the African American community was finally starting to make its voice heard across the broader American culture. Many black Southerners migrated to Northern cities in the 1910s and the early part of this decade, leading to the emergence of a black middle class. Harlem, a neighborhood in upper Manhattan, was the most famous African American community, and so many of the most famous African American writers, artists, and musicians were based there that many historians call this period the Harlem Renaissance. Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and other famous black authors wrote stories that captured the African American experience and were read by millions, and Jazz started to spread throughout the country when white people realized that musicians like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington sounded really awesome. This trend would continue into the 1930s, leading to Swing and Big Band music. Such progress had its limits, though: lynchings, while declining, continued; the Ku Klux Klan enjoyed a resurgence beginning in 1915, reaching a peak in membership in 1925 before a fast decline; and although African-American dancer Josephine Baker became a big star in Paris, she faced racial hostility in America. Meanwhile, intellectuals of the community, such as W. E. B. DuBois, planted the seeds of what would eventually become the Civil Rights Movement.
Shorter work hours, coupled with higher wages and a larger part of the population working in cities paved the way for the beginning of a proper entertainment industry, which itself heralded the birth of what we call "pop culture." While the first "true" celebrities (Houdini and Chaplin) had come around in the decade before, the term itself became popular in the '20s as many personalities would become worshiped by their followers.
Silent films became an art medium of their own with classic films like The Wind (1928) and Metropolis setting new heights for screen drama and great comedians like Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd gaining enormous popularity, along with such fellow movie stars as Clara Bow, Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks, John Gilbert and child actors Baby Peggy and Jackie Coogan. The fact that the movies didn't have sound meant that they still hadn't killed off Vaudeville or Minstrel Shows just yet, but the advent of talkies beginning with The Jazz Singer finished the job— and also killed the careers of many silent actors. Radio progressed quickly through the last of its experimental phases and was firmly established as a mass-market medium by the end of the decade (including radios in cars, brought to you by some lowly company called Motorola), also establishing what is now known as "popular music" in the process. Pro athletes also became objects of popular passion, as star slugger Babe Ruth, portentous pugilist Jack Dempsey, pigskin powerhouse Red Grange, golfing great Bobby Jones, tennis talent Bill Tilden and others became heroes for the common man. Basketball, pool and hockey also gained popularity, and bowling was a popular informal sport decades before becoming a sitcom staple.
Magazines and newspapers enjoyed a booming circulation, including plenty of tabloids (New York had the Daily News, the Mirror, and the Evening Graphic – not to say that broadsheets like the World, the American, and the Evening Journal were any too objective) to fill everybody in on sensational divorce trials in New York, graphic pictures of shootouts in Chicago, the scandalous doings of celebrities in Hollywood, and the typical tales of daring people sitting in poles for several hours. Magazines were also subject to such new ideas as investigative reporting and the digesting of articles from different magazines into a single publication. Lurid "dime novels" printed on pulp paper were also very popular. Meanwhile, ultra-low-def mechanical television enjoyed brief success with early adopters (essentially beta-testers) before getting killed off by The Great Depression by the mid-'30s. The emergence of (relatively) high-definition all-electronic TV would have to wait until another postwar prosperity boom.
This came at a time when the progressivism of The Gilded Age embodied by Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson was replaced by a new conservative order led by Republican Presidents Warren G. Harding (1921–23), Calvin Coolidge (1923–29) and Herbert Hoover (1929–33), while the Democratic party became dominated by Southern conservatives. There were fears that Bolshevism might take over the world if the League of Nations consolidated or if those impish immigrants, those undesirable unions, or that pesky Pope with the protocols were to undermine the free enterprise system among other American values.
Of course, the relics of The Gay '90s and The Edwardian Era, now doughty dowagers and grumpy old Colonels, look on disapprovingly, condemning everything from short skirts and hair, to make-up and swimming wear. Of course, the "Bright Young Things" weren't really listening, and since those killjoys were among the ones who thought Prohibition and that not-so-great Great War were such good ideas, who could blame them? The new-fangled movies took a lot of the heat, as much for the off-screen antics of the stars (paging Mr. Arbuckle) as for the films' content.
Many studio execs were immigrants, Jewish/Catholic, or both, and critics charged they were intentionally corrupting America's youth with their films. Local censorship boards threatened to make life impossible for the studio bosses, who started thinking that guy who ran the Post Office might be able to help.
One should also note that while things were just swell in America, Britain and (to a lesser extent) much of Western Europe (where it was dubbed The Golden '20s across The Pond and "Années Folle"s or the "Crazy Years" in France), if you were in an area hard hit by World War I (say, Germany, Italy, Russia, Turkey or the entire Caucasus Mountains region... before the Soviets annexed it) this was not a fun time. However, it doesn't mean that they didn't try, once they were able to pull themselves together again. But in Germany, there are communist and fascist paramilitary groups who have some very grand ambitions and there will be a few people who get a chilling feeling that one loud-mouth Austrian with a tooth-brush mustache is going to be very big trouble.
America's booming wealth and newfound geopolitical importance meant that lots of American writers and intellectuals (many of them disaffected by what they saw as the country's political complacency, puritanical moralism, and empty materialism) spent most of their time in Europe during this period, soaking up Europe's old culture even as European thinkers dreamed of wiping it all clean and starting over. The contrast between "naive" Americans and "decadent" Europe set a fictional pattern which has endured nearly a century.
Soviet Russia (called USSR since 1922), after a devastating civil war, experienced a short period of economic growth thanks to the NEP (new economic policy), a series of reforms that allowed free enterprise and private property. A new Soviet bourgeoisie was born, with a penchant for over-the-top parties and a slavish fascination with American fashion, music and dance. The Soviet Nouveau Riche (typically called a nepman) was a stock character in '20s Russian satire. Rather funny, they left behind the most durable heritage in Soviet arts and design, as most Soviet architecture and industrial design from the 1920s to the 1970s was ludicrously similar to period American design.
This period lasted sometime after World War I till the Crash of 1929, or just before the New Deal of 1933, or the entire Prohibition era (1920-1933). In cultural terms however, the 20s might have started with the first jazz recording in 1917, and didn't end until 1935. Understandably, there was a great deal of nostalgia for this era starting pretty much as soon as it ended, with a lot of '30s movies (especially the gangster ones) being set during this decade, and it was often a nostalgic setting during the '40s, '50s, '60s, and well into the '70s and '80s. Actually, it has gotten to the point of people a century later still relating to this decade.
For the 1939 movie of the same name, see The Roaring Twenties (1939).
For more information about the decade see the Useful Notes page.
Also see: The Gay '90s, The Edwardian Era, The Great Depression, The '40s, The '50s, The '60s, The '70s, The '80s, The '90s, Turn of the Millennium, The New '10s, and The New '20s for more decade nostalgia.
This ain't baloney, this is Serious Beeswax, as most words and phrases we use nowadays originated from this decade, so here are some examples, see?:
- "Ab-so-lute-ly"
- "And how!" - I agree!
- "Applesauce" - Nonsense!
- "Attaboy!/Attagirl!" - well done, son/lad/lass/boy/girl/kid.
- "Baby" - sweetheart, also a respectable word.
- "Bank's closed" - No Hugging, No Kissing
- "Baloney" - Blatant Lies or just nonsense
- "Bear cat" - Tsundere
- "Beat it" or "23 skidoo" - get lost or GTFO!
- "Bee's knees" or "Cat's meow" - an extraordinarily splendid person, idea or thing.
- "Big cheese" - important person
- "Big six" - The Big Guy
- "Blind date" - dating a stranger
- "Bootleg", "hooch" or "giggle water" - alcoholic beverage
- "Bump off" - to kill
- "Butt me" - I'll take a cigarette, please.
- "Cheaters" - eyeglasses
- "Crush" - infatuation
- "Dick" - no, not that dick, a private investigator
- "Doll" or "Dame" - sexy woman
- "Double cross" - backstabbing
- "Dogs" - shoes
- "Drug-store cowboy" - ladies' man
- "Dry" - any person or place favoring Prohibition. The opposite term was, of course, "wet".
- "Dumb-bell" - stupid person
- "Dumb Dora" - a pretty, but dim-witted girl (she may not be that dumb)
- "Earful" - enough
- "Egg" - big cheese living the big life.
- "Fall Guy" - frame victim
- "Flapper" and her "Dapper" - a young woman and her dad.
- "Fire extinguisher" - cock blocker or chaperone
- "Fish" - first timer in college or in prison.
- "Fly boy" - aviator
- "For crying out loud!" - the period's Big "OMG!"
- "Gams" - woman's legs
- "Gin mill" or "blind pig" - illegal liquor joint
- "Gold Digger" - woman who marries a man for his wealth
- "Goofy" - in love
- "Hard-boiled" or "bimbo" - tough guy. Overlaps with "big six".
- "Hit on a sixes" - to perform 100 percent
- "Hoofer" - dancer
- "Hotsy-totsy" - pleasing
- "I/You/They is" - replacing "am" or "are"
- "It" - sex appeal
- "Jock" - high school/college athlete
- "Kisser" - mouth
- "Middle aisle" - to marry
- "Moll" - gangster's girl
- "Nertz" - "Aw, nuts"
- "Nifty" - great
- "Nix" - No!
- "Pipe down" - shut up
- "Putting on the Ritz" - go high style
- "Sap" - fool
- "See?" - essentially a Verbal Tic that comes at the end of sentences, see?
- "See a man about a dog" - an old excuse to where he's leaving without any apparent reason
- "Sheik" and "Sheba" - man and woman with sex appeal, respectively
- "So's your old man" - dismissive response to a personal boast. May have first circulated among soldiers in World War I, but was more widely used in the 1920s. (The reference to it in The Music Man is anachronistic.)
- "Spiffy" - an elegant appearance.
- "Swell" - wonderful
- "Tomato" - sexy woman
- "Torpedo" - hired gun
- "What's eating you?" - What's wrong?
- "Whoopee!" - having a gay old time
- "You slay me" - that's funny.
note
- '20s Bob Haircut: From the classic Irene Castle bob to Josephine Baker's boyish Eton Crop, from the sleek Louise Brooks shingle cut to the Clara Bow puff and the wavy Joan Crawford perm; different styles, same cut.
- Art Deco in her full blossomed glory.
- B Movies: Surged around this time as bigger budgets became more common, with the film industry ending up differentiated between larger studios such as Paramount and Universal from "Poverty Row" companies.
- The first Exploitation Films also came out around this time, presented as "educational" fare, often presented by a "Professor" or a "Doctor". However many of them were just excuses to display more explicit content (namely nudity) than the major studios yet allowed at the time (this being the pre-Code era).
- Banned In Boston: And the rest of America, alcoholic beverages.
- Barely-There Swimwear: Nowadays it's an Old-Timey Bathing Suit, but it was completely daring on that era. Two-piece bathing suits (the forerunner to the bikini) were specially controversial (even though it were just the same type —better known as the "pin up" nowadays — popular through The '50s, seeing revivals of sorts in The '80s and The New '10s).
- Blackface: Values Dissonance ahoy!
- But Not Too White: Although fair skin was still by far the mainstream beauty standard, African-American Josephine Baker's "caramel" complexion and Coco Chanel's vacation tan made white women desire tanned skin for the first time in history.
- Cosmic Horror Story: If you're H. P. Lovecraft.
- Dance Sensation:
- In prosperous times like these, dances like The Shimmy, The Charleston and The Black Bottom would set the dance floor ablaze with sensational flappers cutting the rug. The former was banned as bootleg, yet praised as a good aerobic dance; the latter two became the rage during the rest of the decade.
- Later in the decade, following Charles Lindbergh's successful transatlantic flight in 1927, a dance craze involving swinging moves was named after him, and it was called the Lindy Hop. Much like any other dance fads of the decade, surely the Lindy Hop wouldn't last a year or two, right?
- Josephine Baker became a dance sensation in Paris.
- Damn, It Feels Good to Be a Gangster!: With the onset of Prohibition, organized crime became rampant.
- The Dandy: During this time, male interest in fashion became commonplace. Thus, low and soft collars, colorful shirts, wide Windsor-type ties, high-waist flares and two-button jackets were quickly adopted by "sheiks."
- Diesel Punk: It was just starting out with Fritz Lang's Metropolis
- Dry Crusader: To those who supported Prohibition.
- Dumb Blonde: While the trope has older examples, the modern dumb blonde stereotype was given a huge surge in popularity via Anita Loos's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925).
- Early-Installment Weirdness: The early years of the decade was a recovery period from war, revolutions, and a pandemic that resulted in a wide recession that lasted around mid-1921. Men's fashions at the start of the decade were a casual continuation of Edwardian styles, and women's fashions looked nothing like the popular depictions of 1920s fashions, with their baggy tunic structures, longer skirts, natural waistlines, and loose windswept hairstyles decorated with elaborate headcombs.
- The Flapper: All women in this dance era are usually "flappers." She would typically wear a:
- Cool Crown: Though not royalty, tiara and the feathered sequined headbands gave added glamour in the evening in the first half of the decade.
- Petite Pride: The "washboard" look of the flappers. Special bras that flatten the chest and girdles that flatten the hips were worn to achieve the look, and necklines were square, boat, or v-shaped to deemphasize the chest.
- Qipao: Chinese flappers (called modeng xiaojie) and socialites started to wear these high-slit, figure hugging dresses in contrast to the loose Western dresses and in reaction against the loose robes of the Qing dynasty.
- Unconventional Wedding Dress: Downplayed with flapper brides as they still wore white on their wedding day, but much to the contention of the conservatives, the wedding dresses also followed the styles of day and evening dresses, with the hemlines were being raised, the sleeves being out, the veils being Juliet caps that resemble cloche hats and had trains that went for miles, and the bouquets being big and cascading they were impossible to carry with one hand. Even royals like the future Queen Mother Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon wore a flapper-esque wedding dress on her marriage to the future king George VI of Britain in 1923.
- Foreign Culture Fetish:
- Following the discovery of King Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922, a wave of Egyptomania followed suit.
- A minor one, at least for Chanel, are all things Russian like Cossack coats, boots, and constructivist motifs.
- In this decade, Berlin became a cultural mecca for any budding artist whose streets and Kaffeehäuser are filled to the brim with intellectuals and writers writing off their Lost Generation woes, films filled with expressionist motifs, and art filled with abstract and deconstructive tones.
- The Fundamentalist: Religious organizations became influential forces in many fields.
- The Gay '90s: A nostalgic setting during the period, with many sketches poking fun at all those "Belle Époque" fashions.
- The Generation Gap between flapper girls and their Victorian parents.
- Genteel Interbellum Setting: A spiffy setting where parties, intrigue, and wacky situations collide, where the men wore sleek tuxedoes and the women wore loose, beaded dresses, as they dance around the Art Deco style ballrooms of scenic country houses or grand hotels.
- Good Old Ways: The activism of the Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson eras faced a serious backlash during the era. Warren G. Harding's campaign proposed a "return to normalcy."
- High-Class Gloves: Once the war and flu pandemic were out, and sun tanning and sleevless dresses were in, the gloves were usually off. Those who opted for gloves wore wrist length ones throught the decade, and opera length for the evenings. Nevertheless, popular media still portray flappers in opera gloves for sex appeal reasons.
- Jive Turkey: In the decade of gangsters and flappers, slang was abound.
- Music of the 1920s:
- Blues: Popular throughout the 1920s and 1930s.
- Jazz: Became universally popular thanks to the orchestras of Paul Whiteman ("The King of Jazz"), Rudy Vallee and Ted Lewis among others, while songwriters such as Cole Porter, George Gershwin and the team of Rodgers & Hart began the "Great American Songbook". Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington also became wildly popular with black and white audiences alike.
- Old-Timey Ankle Taboo: Became really old hat when the skirts barely covered the kneecaps, and when the flaming youth poked fun of such Victorian prudery.
- Pimped-Out Dress: Perhaps the most prominent decade of the 20th century for this trope. There's the figureless beaded chemise dresses as you see on old photographs and fashion magazines, the little black dresses made by Chanel, and then there's the 1920s alternative dress, the robes de style. Popular couturiers at this era include:
- Coco Chanel: co-pioneer of The Flapper chic, debuted her trademark No. 5 perfume and the codifier of the Little Black Dress, focused on adding ropes of pearls juxtaposed on simple and sporty cuts;
- Jean Patou: Chanel's contemporary, also codifying The Flapper, introduced casual and sportswear in women's fashion, the first designer to put monograms on garments, the guy who shortened the hemlines to the knees, only to lengthen it back later in the decade.
- Madeleine Vionnet: trademark includes Grecian-style draped dresses, perfected the bias-cut note in 1922, and would become a 1930s staple.
- Jeanne Lanvin: Designer for matching mother-daughter outfits and is the prominent user of the robes de stylenote
- Elsa Schiaparelli: a latecomer throughout the decade, her early collections included knitwear with fake bows and sailor collars knitted in the sweater.
- Pretty in Mink: Dyeing furs different colors became popular, whether it was the raccoon coats worn by men, or the feather boas by women.
- Red Scare: Thirty years Older than You Think. Russia succumbed to it, and almost all of Europe being more threatened with it, Germany the most, after the war.
- The end of the Silent Age of film and animation.
- Slapstick: The big three are Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton, joined by the end of the decade by Laurel and Hardy and The Marx Brothers.
- Stepford Smiler: Thoroughly expressed by the writers of the Lost Generation such as Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, where inside the parties and the booze-drenched shell lies an empty core filled with economic downturns, depression, and wartime trauma waiting to crack.
- Suburbia: Surged during this time as automobiles and bungalow houses became increasingly popular and affordable.
- The New Rock & Roll: Jazz is really the Trope Maker.
- Trope Makers: Everything we know as "popular culture" emerged at one time or another during the decade, thus making TV Tropes possible. Popular tropes that originated and/or popularized in this era are:
- Badass in a Nice Suit: Gangsters quickly took a liking to the newly-popular double-breasted suitnote , to the point these became colloquially known as "gangster suits."
- Charlie Chaplin Shout-Out: In 1914, Charlie Chaplin became such a huge movie star that he became the first pop culture icon, with countless references to his character the Tramp being common through the middle of the decade.
- Crossword Puzzle: While it was invented in 1913, crosswords only recieved widespread phenomenon in every newspaper beginning in this decade, and has never stopped boggling minds in every piece of print or screen media ever since.
- Little Black Dress: Which Chanel first designed during this period.
- Odessa Steps: While the mass shooting during the Russian Revolution of 1905 never happened, this was the Signature Scene for The Battleship Potemkin , and it had been paid homage ever since.
- Pom-Pom Girl: Before about 1925, all cheer squads featured only men (yup, even in "co-ed" campuses, believe it or not), but soon after some flappers decided to get in the act, and the rest its history...
- Product Placement: While this trope is actually Older Than Dirt, it only became popular during the decade thanks to radio and movies.
- Quirky Ukulele: The widespread proliferation of the Polynesian instrument thanks to the radio and celebrity endorsement, and its portability and ease of playing, made it go past its novelty stage, and became a staple of blithey 1920s jazz.
- Robot: These mechanical beings were given a name after the premiere of R.U.R. in 1921, and were popularized by Metropolis in 1927.
- Satiating Sandwich: The introduction of fast-food hamburgers by White Castle in 1921, and the invention of the pop-up toaster and of sliced bread in 1921 and 1928 respectively, has made sandwich making significantly convenient, greatly codifying this trope.
- The Vamp: The more seductive counterpart of The Flapper, with her shadowy makeup and sultry looks, popularized by actresses Theda Bara and Gloria Swanson.
- Women Drivers: As cars became more commonplace, and more women pursuing a more active role had little experience of driving at first, we have this trope.
- Uncanny Valley Makeup: Not only is it dated, women's makeup was often deliberately garish, for reasons such as flappers rebelling against the taboo of "painted ladies," to help actress' eyes and mouths pop out on black and white film, or to invoke the heavy kohl of ancient Egyptians.
Works set in this time period:
- 91 Days - Opens in 1921, and the main story takes place in 1928.
- Akatsuki no Aria - Takes place in 1923, and has the Great Kanto Earthquake as a plot point.
- Chrono Crusade
- Fushigi Yuugi: Genbu Kaiden - The prequel to Fushigi Yuugi, featuring Takiko aka Genbu No Miko, who lived in this decade's Imperial Japan before being Trapped in Another World. More exactly, it takes place in 1923.
- Haikara-san ga Tooru - Another piece that happens in 1923 and includes the Great Kanto Earthquake
- Golden Days
- Gosick
- Kasei Yakyoku - Third one that both takes place in 1923 and features the Great Kanto Earthquake as a plot twist/point.
- Mars Red - Fourth one that both takes place in 1923 and features the Great Kanto Earthquake as a plot point.
- My Daddy Long Legs
- Sakura Gari - Happens through 1920
- Sakura no Ichiban!
- Sakura Wars (2000)
- Steel Angel Kurumi
- Porco Rosso
- Bungo Stray Dogs - The Character design is inspired by this trope but it is set in the modern times.
- Tintin. First appeared in January, 1929. Tintin - Tintin in the Land of the Soviets (1929-1930).
- The Necronauts comic is set during this period, and involves several celebrities of the time.
- King Mob of The Invisibles gets to travel back in time to the Roaring Twenties.
- The Grace Brannagh incarnation of Promethea held that role in the Twenties and Thirties.
- An Abrafaxe arc (Mosaik No. 301-322) is set in America in 1929. Prohibition-era gangsters abound, Abrax is a G-man and Califax makes a fortune selling hotdogs, but as he invests his profits on the stock market he loses it all on Black Friday.
- The Italian Disney series The Amazing Adventures of Fantomius-Gentleman Thief is mostly set in this period, with a few flashbacks to the period before World War I. A time travel episode also sets up for the series to not continue after The Great Depression.
- Rupert Bear. First appeared in November 1920.
- Little Orphan Annie. First appeared in August 1924.
- The Adventures of Prudence Prim. Published between 1925 and 1926, set contemporaneously.
- The Fortunes of Flossie. Published between 1926 and 1927, set contemporaneously.
- Buck Rogers. First appeared in January 1929.
- Popeye. First appeared in January 1929.
- Bixels and Tulliok's Grand Galloping 20s series reimagines the cast of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic in 1920s rural america, with some supernatural elements thrown in for flavor.
- Don Bluth's Anastasia. As the bulk in the movie takes place in Russia, this aspect is downplayed, since (as noted above) things weren't so great there at the time. Once Anya and friends arrive in Paris however, it's this trope all the way.
- The Princess and the Frog is a particularly Troperiffic example, set in The Big Easy during Mardi Gras for added effect. Naturally most of the soundtrack is jazz-based.
- Charlie Chaplin made his last couple of shorts then moved exclusively into features during this decade
- Changeling
- Chariots of Fire: Focuses on the 1924 Paris Olympics and the events leading to it, specifically involving British sprinters Harold Abrahams and Eric Liddell.
- Chicago (based on a 1926 play)
- Downton Abbey
- Easy Virtue's motif is more Genteel Interbellum Setting but Larita's presence and John's lifestyle evoke the spirit of the Roaring 20s - and how it clashes heavily with a conservative English countryside still mourning World War I. Other characters like Sarah seem like they're on their way to embracing the free-spirited lifestyle.
- Fantastic Beasts: The films start in the 1920s, seventy years before the start of the Harry Potter series, which is set in the 1990s. However, only the first two take place in this decade. The third installment, The Secrets of Dumbledore, has a Time Skip into the 1930s.
- Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them: The film is set in December 1926 exclusively in New York City. Some of the tropes associated with the era are featured and given magical twists, what with Queenie being a flapper and a visit to a wizarding speakeasy.
- Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald: The sequel to the above. It takes place (mostly) in Paris in September 1927. The era's tropes are given less emphasis, with the time period treated more as incidental than it was in the previous movie.
- The Front Page (1974)
- The Great Gatsby
- The Great Gatsby (1926)
- The Great Gatsby (1949)
- The Great Gatsby (1974)
- The Great Gatsby (2013)
- The Great Waldo Pepper
- The Immigrant
- The Jazz Singer
- Johnny Dangerously
- The Last Gangster (the first half takes place in 1927, then there's a ten-year Time Skip)
- Leatherheads
- Little Caesar
- Live by Night
- Lucky Lady
- Magic in the Moonlight
- Ma Rainey's Black Bottom
- Metropolis was released in 1927 and features a futuristic dystopia version of the era.
- Some of Midnight in Paris
- Miller's Crossing
- The Mummy (1999)
- Once Upon a Time in America
- Oscar
- Our Dancing Daughters
- Our Modern Maidens
- The Public Enemy (1931)
- The Roaring Twenties (1939)
- Robin and the 7 Hoods
- Rum Runners
- Sappho
- Singin' in the Rain
- Some Like It Hot
- Splendor in the Grass
- The St Valentines Day Massacre
- Sunset
- Thoroughly Modern Millie
- The Shining (only the scene in the ballroom with Grady, the rest of it takes place in the Seventies)
- The Untouchables (1987)
- Why Be Good? A film from 1929, starring flapper sensation Colleen Moore.
- The Wind That Shakes the Barley: A 2005 Irish film that is set in 1920.
- Most works of H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) not set in a Dream Land.
- Several Jeeves and Wooster stories (1917-1966) by P. G. Wodehouse, and a decent number of his many other ones, too.
- The first published works by Agatha Christie appeared in this decade.
- Hercule Poirot. The novel series started in 1920.
- Tommy and Tuppence. The series started in 1922.
- Miss Marple. First appeared in December, 1927. Starred in a number of short stories.
- Bulldog Drummond. The novel series started in 1920.
- Babbitt. First published in 1922.
- Black Duck by Janet Lisel Taylor is set at the end of the decade, in a small Rhode Island town which facilitates the rum-running for the parties in the big cities.
- Lord Peter Wimsey. The novel series started in 1923.
- The Most Dangerous Game. First published in January 1924.
- Charlie Chan. The franchise began with a series of novels that started in 1925.
- The Chosen and the Beautiful: A Historical Fantasy retelling of The Great Gatsby.
- Gentlemen Prefer Blondes - the novel first published in 1925 and the stage musical based on it. The movie musical starring Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell was however set in the 1950s.
- The Great Gatsby (1925) is probably the best-known novel set in the 1920s. It features a number of classic elements of the era, including the wartime memories, Jazz Age parties, and wealthy bootleggers. For that matter, much of F. Scott Fitzgerald oeuvre was produced in the 1920s and set there.
- Hanabishi Fusai no Taima-chou - Takes place in 1920
- Murder for the Modern Girl: Takes place in 1928 Chicago.
- Sannikov Land (1926)
- Some of Ernest Hemingway's work.
- Including his (actual) debut novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926). The Torrents of Spring being a blatant Springtime for Hitler.
- The Hardy Boys. Series started in June, 1927.
- Elmer Gantry (1927)
- Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)
- The Twelve Chairs (1928) is a famous depictions of the Soviet 20's culture.
- and its sequel The Little Golden Calf (1931), still set in this era.
- Albert Campion. This series of novels started in 1929.
- Bony. This series of novels started in 1929.
- Taishō Baseball Girls - Takes place in 1925
- Tender Is the Night (1934) is set in France, but mostly portrays Americans of the era.
- Practically the entire published output of Edward Gorey (1925-2000).
- Auntie Mame (1955) begins prior to the 1929 Crash.
- The Phryne Fisher mysteries (1989-) are set in 1928 and 1929, in Melbourne, Australia.
- The novel Maisie Dobbs (2003) by Jacqueline Winspear is set in 1929, and introduces a series of books following a woman who went from a life "in service" (working as a maid in a grand house at 13) to university student, front-line nurse in The Great War, and eventually a private detective.
- The Full Matilda (2004) has events starting in this period. Matilda's main storyline starts here, and she continues to live this lifestyle until the day she dies.
- The Princess 99 (c. 2009) takes place in 1924, in New Orleans... but with wizards!
- Bride of the Rat God takes place in the Hollywood silent film era.
- Live by Night (pub. 2012)
- The Diviners (2012)
- Nya tider by Solveig Olsson-Hultgren takes place in 1920 and 1921. A brand new fashion has started to emerge (Greta and Rebecka even cut their hair short!), in the fall women vote for the first time. Jazz is the new popular music for young people.
- The Long Shalom (pub. 2023) is set in 1927 in New York City.
- Babylon Berlin
- Boardwalk Empire
- The Brady Bunch: The 1973 episode "Never Too Young" has the family planning for a Roaring Twenties party. At one point, Mike and Carol duet on "I Want To Be Loved By You" (originally from the 1928 musical "Good Boy"), the older kids pore through a stack of old phonographs and laughing at some of the absurd titles of some of the songs, and the family rehearsing for a Charleston competition.
- Cable Girls: In the late '20s Madrid.
- Charmed (1998): In "Pardon My Past", Prue, Piper and Phoebe time-travel back to the '20s.
- Doctor Who: A few stories, notably "Black Orchid" and "The Unicorn and the Wasp".
- Downton Abbey: Starting in Series 3.
- Forever (2014): The episode "Best Foot Forward" has flashbacks talking place in Paris 1929. They show Henry Morgan discovering that a sculptor friend has been abusing heroin. He later finds her overdosed.
- Ghosts (US): The episodes "Alberta's Podcast" and “Whodunnit” has flashbacks set in this era.
- The House of Eliott
- Interview with the Vampire (2022): The Jazz Age officially began in 1917 with the release of the first jazz record, which matches the year of the past events in "Is My Very Nature That of a Devil". "...The Ruthless Pursuit of Blood with All a Child's Demanding" is set in 1917-1923, while "A Vile Hunger for Your Hammering Heart" covers 1923-1930, with the final year overlapping with The Great Depression.
- Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries
- Mr Selfridge
- Peaky Blinders
- Poirot, the TV series; the books actually span a much longer period. (The Miss Marple series, meanwhile, is set in a different version of this trope - what might be called the suburban one. Middle-aged housewives sit around musing how hard it is to get good help since The War gave the rabble ideas.)
- Ken Burns produced a three-part documentary entitled Prohibition about, well, Prohibition. The Roaring Twenties take up most of the second and third episodes.
- The Roaring '20s, a 1960-62 crime drama on ABC, was naturally set in this period.
- Invoked in the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "A Piece of the Action". Although set in the far future the Enterprise encounters a planet which based its culture around a book left behind by a previous expedition, Chicago Mobs of the Twenties. A planet of fedoras indeed.
- Though we never get to see it, the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Course: Oblivion" has a holodeck program set in Chicago of that period, which would have been the place for the duplicate Voyager's Tom Paris and B'Elanna Torres' honeymoon.
- The Twilight Zone (1959): In "The Trouble with Templeton", Booth Templeton continually hearkens back to the 1920s when he was young and his beloved wife Laura and his best friend Barney Flueger were still alive to the point that he no longer lives in the present.
- The Twilight Zone (1985): In "The Convict's Piano", Ricky Frost plays the song "Someone to Watch Over Me" on the old prison piano so that he will be sent back in time to 1928. He sums up the 1920s by saying "Calvin Coolidge, flappers, bathtub gin." Once he arrives in 1928, Ricky finds himself in the middle of a party being thrown by Mickey Shaughnessy where the guests are all drinking illegal alcohol. He decides to stay in 1928 instead of returning to 1986, where he is serving a life sentence for a murder that he didn't commit.
- Underbelly: Razor begins in 1927. The prequel, Underbelly: Squizzy, ends in 1927.
- Upstairs Downstairs (seasons 3-5)
- Z: The Beginning of Everything begins in 1917 but gets to the 20s by the fifth episode, showing how Zelda Fitzgerald embraced The Flapper lifestyle, and she and her husband F. Scott Fitzgerald got famous for their rowdy partying.
- The New Yorker began publishing in 1925.
- Radio Times began publishing in 1923.
- Reader's Digest began publishing in 1922.
- TIME Magazine began publishing in 1923.
- Weird Tales began its original run in 1923.
- Olde Wrestling. Founded in 2013, set in the 1920s.
- Adventure!, one of the Trinity Universe games, takes place in this area — 1924 to be precise.
- Call of Cthulhu
- The Spirit of the Century RPG is The Theme Park Version of this decade.
- Gangbusters was set in an Expy of 1920s Chicago, with player-characters on both sides of the law.
- Mysterium takes place during this decade, with mediums from all around the globe gathering to elucidate a murder which occured 35 years prior.
- Wraith: The Oblivion's historical supplement, Wraith: The Great War, is set in this time period, as World War I triggers upheaval and devastation in the realms of the dead.
- The '20s was when Broadway musicals as we know them first started to become popular, led by Cole Porter (although he didn't begin to achieve success until the late 20s, and his most well-known shows - Anything Goes and Kiss Me, Kate didn't come out until the 30s and 40s, respectively). They reached a zenith in the 1930s, but many still associate Cole Porter with the Roaring 20s nonetheless.
- To the point that The Drowsy Chaperone specifically parodied musicals from the 20s, even though many of the shows it was parodying - like the above Anything Goes - didn't come out until the 1930s.
- The Boy Friend, and its 1971 film adaptation.
- Cabaret is set in 1929 Berlin.
- Mame begins prior to the Crash of '29.
- Some Like It Hot is set at the tail end of Prohibition-era America and features speakeasies, gangsters, jazz, and plenty of tap dancing.
- Cultist Simulator
- Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble!.
- The Dead Reckoning series of Hidden Object Games from Eipix is set in this era.
- Draugen set in 1923, is a more subdued take on the period than most, taking place in a small Norweigan village.
- Don't Starve: The characters all seem to be from the The Edwardian Era, to the 1920s as Wilson was taken to the Constant in 1921, and the fashion, cars, and tech like phones and radios in some of the shorts all show the era.
- Dreams in the Witch House (2023) takes place from the start of March to the end of May 1929.
- Gangsters, based entirely around the 20's criminal world, albeit in a fictional setting (no real-world bustling cities or shady individuals were harmed).
- Empire of Sin is set in the Roaring 20s.
- Activision's Atari 2600 Platform Game Keystone Kapers is set in this era.
- Mob Enforcer, with you playing as Al Capone's lead henchmen and gunning down tons of rival gangsters.
- Lionhead Studios’ The Movies has the player begin their film studio in 1920 and develop technology to get talkies later on in the decade.
- The Penny Arcade Adventures series
- Raidou Kuzunoha vs. The Soulless Army, set in year 20 of the Taisho era (think Taishō Baseball Girls).
- Ditto with the sequel, Raidou Kuzunoha vs. King Abaddon.
- Rollercoaster Tycoon 2, in the 'Time Twisters' expansion pack, provides a lot of iconic Roaring Twenties art deco architecture and memorabillia to create a park themed around it. (Literally an Expansion Pack Past?)
- Sakura Wars (1996) is set in an alternate timeline Steampunk version of this period.
- Shadow Hearts: From The New World is set in the mid-twenties, and one plot thread involves the Chicago mob war.
- Roaring Heights, a neighborhood for The Sims 3 that can be downloaded from the Sims Store.
- The fictional world of Skullgirls contains lots of references to this era: Jazz music, Art-Deco-style buildings, detectives, etc.
- SOS is set in September 13, 1921, in which the Lady Crithania capsizes during a violent storm at night, and some survivors must make their way out within one hour.
- The 1991 platformer El Viento is set in 1928, and involves stopping Al Capone* and a doomsday cult from bringing cosmic horrors into the world.
- The second game in the series, Earnest Evans, is set in 1926 and follows another character attempting to fight the same enemies. At least, that's the story in the original Japanese version; the American release deleted the cutscenes, completely changed the story, and claimed it was a distant sequel set in the 1980s.
- Speakeasy Tonight
- Juniper's Knot: Not that it's obvious, given how little interaction there is outside of a small room.
- Alleged Whiskey is set in 1928 California, just before talking motion pictures became popular.
- Chess Piece takes place at the near end of this decade. Of course, it being an alternate universe, some things are very, very different. Like ghosts inhabiting Antarctica, demons ruling Australia (no, really), and America being ruled by a kindly demonic-looking king.
- Lackadaisy is a fairly accurate depiction of the era outside of presence of a cathedral radio, a few anachronistic cars (by one year), and, maybe, checkbooks. Oh yeah, and the cast being anthropomorphic felines.
- Problem Sleuth, save for the occasional Anachronism Stew.
- Shaderunners is based on a fantasy version of Prohibition where booze is swapped in for color.
- The Silent Age of Animation was still ongoing, until Steamboat Willie debuted.
- The Fleischer Studios produced its first hit series
- Out of the Inkwell series (1918-1929).
- Koko's Earth Control (1928).
- Talkartoons (1929-1932)
- Screen Songs (1929-1938).
- Out of the Inkwell series (1918-1929).
- Debuting in 1919, Felix the Cat was arguably the first famous cartoon character.
- Feline Follies (1919)
- Felix in Hollywood(1923)
- The Krazy Kat comic strip received several animated adaptations (1920-1921, 1925-1929, 1929-1939).
- Walt Disney got his start in this decade with his company Disney. His first notable works were:
- The Newman Laugh-O-Grams (1921-1923)
- The Alice Comedies (1923-1927)
- Pete debuted in 1925.
- Oswald the Lucky Rabbit (debuting in 1927).
- Classic Disney Shorts. They start with the Mickey Mouse shorts of 1928.
- Mickey Mouse got his start in 1928, at the end of this decade.
- Minnie Mouse debuted in 1928.
- Plane Crazy (1928)
- Steamboat Willie (1928)
- The first few Silly Symphonies in 1929.
- The Skeleton Dance (1929).
- Walter Lantz got his start in this decade.
- Dinky Doodle (1924-1926).
- Bosko, the Talk-Ink Kid by Harman and Ising and his film were both created in 1929. Though the character only got his public debut in 1930.
- The Legend of Korra is set in the Avatar universe's version of this time period, and the soundtrack shows the influence, with Word of God describing it as "If Jazz was invented in China during the 20s."
- Gremlins: Secrets of the Mogwai is a prequel to the film Gremlins following a young Sam Wing (the old man who ran the shop at the beginning of the film) during his youth in 1920s Shanghai.
- At Knotts Berry Farm, the "Boardwalk" area, which now holds most of the park's thrill rides, was previously called "The Roaring 20s," a literal theme park version of the era.
- Twig begins in an alternate version of 1921.
- Doris & Mary-Anne Are Breaking Out of Prison is set in 1922.
Works made in (but not necessarily set during) the twenties: