WITH THE END of the first World War and the ensuing economic boom of the 1920s, Harper’s Bazaar documented the sea change in the culture. A new freedom took hold of the popular imagination as women bobbed their hair and danced to improvisational rhythms— and nearly everyone evaded the strictures of Prohibition—with the arrival of what F. Scott Fitzgerald dubbed “the Jazz Age.”
The editors of Bazaar were intent on publishing the period’s most distinctive literary voices, including Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, who together penned a piece, “The Changing Beauty of Park Avenue,” for the January 1928 issue, that was keenly attuned to the dynamics of wealth, class, immigration, and real estate, which still resonate today. Editor Henry Sell is credited with discovering Anita Loos, whose irreverent novel Gentlemen…
