The 1920s was the first decade of modern society as we know it, with the emancipation of women, the advent of rapidly changing technology and a desire to live the good life.

It was the era of flappers, jazz and cocktails, the era which F. Scott Fitzgerald called the “most expensive orgy in history.”

Louise Brooks, with her sharp bob haircut, was one of the wild, trail-blazing flappers of the decade. She was the first woman to dance the Charleston in London, and her crazy reputation perhaps inspiring the 1925 song Don’t Bring Lulu, about an unpredictable and shocking woman that you better not bring to the party.

Brooks’ sleek, lacquered black helmet of hair has inspired countless imitations - Anna Karina in Jean-Luc Godard's film Vivre Sa Vie (1962), Melanie Griffith as Lulu in Something Wild (1988) and Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction (1994).

Her bob was not only as a statement of modern femininity, but also as a functional cut for women who were too busy living a fast life to spend time on their hair.

Fashions in the 1920s were a rejection of the constraints of women’s clothes that had restricted them for centuries. Instead of being tightly bound and covered, women raised their hems, dropped the waist-line of their dresses and threw away their corsets, a move partly inspired by their emancipation during the First World War and the effects of the suffragette movement.

The flapper was a new breed of young woman – she was promiscuous, she was hard- drinking, she smoked and could dance all night, in clothing that offered freedom of movement. Women’s faces also became harder, and more knowing, with pale night-owl skin, black kohl rimming the eyes and defined lips, often shaped into a little, pouty cupid's bow.

Louise Brooks’ style was experimental and daring. She wore a cloche hat (a 1920s staple) pulled down over her bob, pleated skirts, wide trousers, velvet blazers, deep cut evening dresses worn without a bra, furs, silk blouses with geometric prints and strings of pearls. Her painted lips were half smiling, half sulking and she possessed the perfect flapper figure; boyishly slender and flat chested.

“A well-dressed woman,” she said, “even if her purse is painfully empty, can conquer the world.”

Brooks was also a very modern silent star who has become more appreciated in retrospect, less for her Hollywood movies like The Canary Murder Case, than for her work in Germany with G.W. Pabst for Pandora's Box and Diary of a Lost Girl. She rejected the exaggerated, pantomime style acting of silent film, for subtlety of expression.

Born in Cherryvale, Kansas in 1906, Louise Brooks was a rebel from a young age, dodging out of small town Mid-West for New York at the age of 15.

It was there in 1922 that she befriended the socialite Bennett sisters, learnt how to dress, went to high society dances, dinners with stock-brokers and had her hair cut into the signature short bob. Before long Hollywood was calling her.

Brooks had never visited Germany or heard of Pabst, but on a whim she signed up to Pandora’s Box, playing the beautiful, charismatic Lulu who drives men to destruction until Jack the Ripper destroys her.

But Brooks was under-appreciated in Hollywood and after a fall out with Paramount Pictures, she was washed up by the mid 1930s. It wasn’t until the 1950s that she was admired again - she entered a second career as a Hollywood memoirist and pithy critic and her autobiography Lulu in Hollywood is well worth a look, for an acerbic insight into her career.

Get the Look

To get Louise Brooks’ cutting edge style you will need to go for the severe cut - cropped short to the ears and with a little fringe. You could also pull a cloche hat over your hair.

Line your eyes with heavy black-kohl, and define the lips while keeping your skin porcelain.

Choose a dress that is low cut, with a low waist-line and to the calf or just below the knee, in a luxurious fabric or with embellishment.

Throw a string of pearls around your neck, a faux fur collar, and wear a pair of medium-heeled Mary-Jane shoes.