In ‘The Beautiful and Damned’ Dick, a writer and cousin of Gloria, wonders ‘that people inevitably chose inimitable people to imitate.’ Yet the young Gloria is imitated relentlessly, desperately, hopelessly, by young women who wish to have a share of her giddy insouciance. She brings a hint of scandal ‘she had gone in the Yale Swimming pool one night in a chiffon evening dress’ –  yet she is so playful, so youthful, so ‘clean’ that the childish whims of her past, which another girl may be judged for, are considered adorable. As Anthony Patch says before their engagement  – ‘It’s your world, isn’t it?’ At this point in the novel it indisputably is.

Gloria is introduced in a fairy tale waiting room of winking stars and gentle winds as ‘beauty, who is born anew every hundred years.’ Beauty sighs at being told she must go once again to earth, she longs for ‘the old lands, the land of grapes and soft tongued men or the land of ships and seas.’ She is told however that this time she will enter earth as a ‘susciety gurl, a sort of bogus aristocrat’ she will be known ‘as a ragtime kid, a flapper, a baby vamp.’ Beauty sighs again – ‘It all sounds terribly vulgar.’

It is, it really is, and yet Gloria also lives in one of the time periods we now most idolise. She is the darling of the Jazz Age. A glittering time of decadence, seediness and a compelling beauty which entices designers and fashion editors to visit it again and again.

Here we look anew at 1920s style through the lens of a girl who defines the age as beautifully and tragically as Gatsby, finally being claimed as a victim of the era, a beautiful sacrifice demanded as recompense for the decadence of her time.

‘Gloria goes, goes, goes,’ we are told ‘she dances all afternoon and all night,’ subsisting mainly on gumdrops.

But when Gloria isn’t dancing, giving dinners and insulting Bloeckman, a film producer and one of the many men who is in love with her, she is very good at looking demure whilst still letting the abundance of her beauty shine through. When Anthony first meets her she ‘holds out a little white gloved hand’ to greet him, and wears ‘an Alice blue dress with white lace crinkled stiffly around her throat.’ Yet still she is ‘Dazzling, alight, her hair full of a heavenly glamour, gay against the winter colour of the room.’Everything about her is vibrant, wonderful ‘The brown mass of fur’ she wears ‘tumbles’ into Anthony’s arms, as she enters the room, secure in her beauty that her coat will be caught and looked after.

Her outfits  take a good deal of planning, and she is well aware of the effect her clothes have on men. In her leather bound journal she writes ‘[Anthony’s] coming at eight, I shall wear pink and look very fresh and starched.’

Photograph by ralucsernatoni on Deviant Art

She stands and waits for him, wearing this dress, summoning all her beauty in the cold April air and when he arrives he rushes to her. ‘Together they crush the stiff folds of her dress in one triumphant, enduring embrace.’

Yet Fitzgerald knew that such beauty, happiness and love could not last. Gloria is beautiful but she is also damned, however a readers knowledge of this inevitable fall makes Gloria’s beauty that much more poignant, a young girl who bobs her hair before it is fashionable to do so, shining briefly in her bogus world.