contra mundum
Cross-dressing
Before World War I, aesthetic figures like Oscar Wilde and Rupert Brooke had expressed their independence from the Establishment by wearing more color and softening the silhouette of their clothes. They wore soft turn-down collars and enormous ties. In the twenties, playwright and songwriter Noel Coward indulged in “a long suppressed desire for silk pyjamas and underclothes” after the roaring success of his first play, The Vortex, in 1924. He also took to wearing “coloured turtle-neck jerseys, actually more for comfort than for effect, and soon I [Coward] was informed by my evening paper that I had started a fashion.”
While men pampered themselves and softened up their wardrobes, some women went for a harsher look.