The Beautiful Fashion Betrayals in the Great Gatsby

Mathilde Panis-Jones
18 February 2016

The Beautiful Fashion Betrayals 

in the Great Gatsby  

We have all seen The great Gatsby and then have wanted to throw a nice twenties-themed party, right? Well, not so fast. You maybe shouldn't be basing yourself off of the great work of director Baz Luhrmann. It turns out the fashion in The great Gatsby isn’t so accurate.

However, this can be justified. In some cases, very accurate costumes that are truly representative of their era will be unattractive or even awkward to a modern eye. Although The Great Gatsby delivers the fashion clichés of the 1920s we all were dying to see (fringe, feathered headpieces, long strips of beads…), they are not quite what they are supposed to look like. Sometimes, very stylised costumes can frustrate viewers who were hoping to see elaborate reproductions of the Roaring Twenties. In the movie adaptation, colours are richer, the dresses more sparkly, and the flappers less lively. 

For example, Daisy is the central female character in the story, and it is her clothing that is the most criticised and accused as ‘’inaccurate’’. In the movie, Daisy is soft, romantic, and wears a lot of lavender (true to the book!). However, this is not so close to the typical image of the streamlined, short 1920s dresses women typically wore.

The costumes of The Great Gatsby will not stand up to a rigorous standard of accuracy, but, Old Sport!, this movie delivers an accurate representation of the social and cultural meaning of clothes in the 1920s, contrary to a boring documentary on PBS.