Coco Chanel in 1920s

Vintage women’s fashion had always had a suffocating air about it-with the bone-crushing corsets and the clingy S-shaped silhouetted dresses, trying to squeeze women of all shapes and sizes into the ideal (read: unrealistic) body type of an hourglass. Fashion before the Roaring Twenties was a traffic jam of billowing dresses, sitting heavy on the hip and sweeping the floor as they went, restricting freedom of movement and completely shutting out looser, smaller length dresses.

Enter-Gabrielle Coco Chanel who sprinkled radicalism in women’s fashion which was long due through a series of anti-fit, knee-length dresses, commonly known as the Little Black Dress. Fun fact: the LBD existed before Chanel’s 1926 piece but she was the first one to specifically design it and bring it to the centre stage. Probably, she, like many other women of the era had had enough of the impractical fashion that was shoved down women’s bodies and decided to liberate them from the Monobosom dresses. This came as a direct repercussion of the aftermath of WW1 during which women went out more, took up jobs, and ran their boots more often in athletic spheres. So, Chanel playing more of a marketeer rather than a feminist, saw the market gap there and curated comfortable clothes for the “modern woman.” She also played a part in inaugurating the new knitwear as she donned a long jersey sweater at a beach in 1913.

As commonly said, “fashion is not an island” the Suffrage Movement became imbibed in the clothing industry through the introduction of androgynous fashion. She invented the controversial term-power dressing with her liberating two-piece tweed suits which came to be known as Chanel’s Uniform, the muse for which was the men’s section. The suit wasn’t just supposed to be a horn to shout androgynous fashion, but was crafted for mobility as well as to feminize the less-glamour fabric-tweed.