All that Jazz – Perspective Magazine

August/September 2024

The carefree socialites of the 1920s can teach us how to let our hair down.

When we were finally released from lockdown in summer 2021, a hedonistic return to real life beckoned – a spangled, shimmering echo of the 1920s années folles was seemingly as inevitable as it was desirable. The covid pandemic had uncannily echoed the Spanish flu outbreak of a century earlier and there were further parallels with the 1920s: the impact of era-defining new technologies, shifty politicians on both sides relying on dog-whistling to stir up support and an apparently inexorable gulf between the richest and poorest in society. Then, on 24 February 2022, Putin invaded Ukraine and sent the international order and world economies spinning. Months of war in Gaza have only intensified the chaos and it is a working possibility that World War III looms up ahead.