But would they really go back to the jazz era?

Hundreds of time travelers in 1920s outfits took ferries to Governors Island earlier this month to attend the two-day Jazz Age Lawn Party, one of New York City’s most curious summer parties. traditions.

They wore flapper dresses with feather boas, pinstripe suits with black and white wing tips, and lots of boat hats, cloche hats, and bow ties. Gathered on picnic blankets in a lawn, they spent the day sipping gin and tonics before dancing to hot jazz performed by the Dreamland Orchestra.

A man in pink pants and suspenders drank beer from a Mason jar while his infant son, also in suspenders, sat on his shoulders. Queues gathered outside a stall selling newsboy caps and another offering on the spot tin type portraits. A pie contest included the “Hobo’s Choice” category, which awarded the treat most likely to be “stolen from a back porch.”

The orchestra was led by pencil-moustached bandleader Michael Arenella, who started the event in 2005. “We were pretty much the first event here,” he said. “It was maybe fifty people then. People are drawn to the Roaring Twenties because there is a youthfulness to the era. After the war, people were looking for a good time, after their brush with mortality.

In the edited interviews below, second-day reenactors named their Jazz Age fashion heroes and wondered if they would actually travel back to the era.

Cyrene Renee

Model and playwright

If you could travel back in time, would you? I would go back. I’d be a showgirl at the Cotton Club and be the best dancer there. However, as much as I love the era, I don’t think life was any better. There was segregation. But despite what we went through as people of color, we created beautiful dance, music and art.

Do you have a Jazz Age fashion hero? Josephine Baker, all day, every day. She was righteous and liberated in her beauty.

Inez Robinson

Educator

Would you go back? I can’t romanticize that period, as a person of color, but I’m very drawn to the fashion of the time. As a resident of Harlem, I have an affinity for the Harlem Renaissance. African Americans used fashion to carry themselves proudly every day.

Fashion hero of the Jazz Age? Coco Chanel. Her designs introduced gender fluidity. She pioneered the idea that you could go either way.

Would you travel back in time? People think of the 1920s as one big party, but it was just good for a few people of a certain persuasion. It was also a time of bigotry and prejudice. I would probably go back for a weekend. However, this is only one period in which I am involved as a re-enactor. I was doing a World War II event the other weekend and I was recently at a Revolutionary War event in Mount Vernon.

Your old-fashioned fashion hero? Douglas Fairbanks Jr. He was married to Joan Crawford and was the best dressed man in Hollywood.

Would you go back? I would like to go back, because I recognize the simplicity of that time. Don’t get me wrong, it was a harder life, and a lot obviously wasn’t right, but things were simpler back then, and I feel like we’re further away from that.

Fashion hero of the Jazz Age? Gary Cooper. He had just started, and he had that elegant swagger. You don’t see elegant swagger in a man these days.

Would you travel back in time? Yes, because I think people were happier back then I would like to arrive before the Great Depression. Women’s liberation began and so much of that fashion is still stylish, from sequins to headbands.

Fashion hero of yesteryear? Carole Lombard. She married Clark Gable and died in a plane crash. She started the blonde hair trend.

Jesse Rosen and Taylor Dunston

Scientist and beauty sales executive

Would you go back?

JR: I think there are aspects of me that wouldn’t do very well then, but to go through those parties, I don’t know…. If I could come back, sure, but I’d stay here if it was a one-way ticket.

Fashion hero of the Jazz Age?

TD: I can’t think of one right away, but I feel like Tom Ford pulled heavily from this era. Are to take are masculine and yet use female color palettes. He likes a luxurious full lapel with strong shoulders, like the gangsters wore. You could say the power suit was born in the 1920s and Ford borrowed from it.

Michael Asante

Flight attendant

Would you go back? I’d be naive to say every era was better, but fashion-wise, I’d like it if everyone still dressed like this. Especially the gangsters, with their red ties and cigars, really brought it.

Fashion hero of the Jazz Age? I feel like Karl Lagerfeld was channeling the jazz era. The gloves. The white collar. His white cat, Choupette, in a carrycot.

Charles Annunziato

Events coordinator

Would you go back? Probably not. The Prohibition era was a time of hardship. Now we can get booze whenever we want.

Fashion hero of the Jazz Age? Bonnie and Clyde. Because they did what they wanted.

Caroline Shaffer and Marissa Koors

Graphic designer and book editor

Would you go back?

CS: Absolutely not. I like the internet and rights as a woman.

MK: Only with a return ticket. I have rights in this age and so do my friends and allies. We also have medicines. I could have caught the Spanish flu.

Fashion hero of the Jazz Age?

CS: Jean Harlow. She played ruthless characters, like women who get involved with married men, but she played them in a surprisingly sympathetic way.

MK: Elsa Schiaparelli. She took from surrealism and said, ‘What if we put lobsters on our dresses?’ Wearing Schiaparelli was wearing art.

Alvin and Marla Nichter

Retired electrical engineer and retired fashion image consultant

Would you go back?

MN: I think I would have fit right in. It was a ladylike time. A time of gentlemen. Girls were girls. Men were men. Wait, can I get in trouble for saying that? What I mean to say is that it was a classy feminine era, which I love.

Fashion hero of the Jazz Age?

AN: My glamorous great-aunt. At the time, she was a fashion buyer for the best department stores in New York. She would go to Paris to bring the latest fashion for New Yorkers. I’ve seen pictures of her. She was the bee’s knees.