Wednesday, October 29, 2025

A smile from a century ago, still bold enough to make the present blush

A young woman of the 1920s reclines upon a wooden swing, one slender leg lifted in a gesture of playful poise, the other extended just enough for her heeled shoe to graze the earth’s surface. She is attired in a loosely draped cardigan worn over a delicate frock or slip, her stockings meticulously rolled to the calf in the manner of the age, and a close-fitting cloche hat nestles over softly marcelled waves of hair. Her lips—darkened to that enigmatic cupid’s bow so favoured by the era’s ingénues—curve into the faintest, most knowing of smiles as her gaze inclines dreamily upward. Bathed in warm sepia hues, the faintly blurred garden beyond imparts an atmosphere at once wistful and beguiling—part coquette’s reverie, part modernist awakening—an image suspended between innocence and sophistication, and perfectly emblematic of a decade learning, with exquisite audacity, how to be modern.
photo: source unknown

Gliding into the modern age with an impossible smile—the kind that might make a bishop forget his sermon and a cynic believe, just for a moment, in beauty. A creature of the 1920s, she wears her rebellion not as armour, but as perfume: her stockings are rolled precisely to the knee, her cloche hat tipped in studied disregard for propriety. In her, one finds the distilled essence of the decade’s greatest contradiction: decorum utterly subverted by delight.

And though the decades may change, though hemlines shift and moral sermons rise only to inevitably fade, her spirit remains imperishably modern: Audacity conducted with grace; her true art is the ability to charm whilst defying, to smile whilst quietly dismantling the rules. —Arthur Newhook, 29 October 2025. {photo: source unknown}

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

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A smile from a century ago, still bold enough to make the present blush

photo: source unknown Gliding into the modern age with an impossible smile—the kind that might make a bishop forget his sermon and a cynic b...