[The Guardian] The big picture: jazz age attitude captured by Dorothy Wilding

The big picture: jazz age attitude captured by Dorothy Wilding

Perhaps the brightest star to emerge from this image of 1920s London was the woman behind the lens

The three graces in Dorothy Wilding’s 1923 photograph Frieze were performers in The Midnight Follies, a new cabaret at the London Metropole hotel. Wilding’s picture, full of attitude in all senses, was designed to promote the show; the Follies promised a jazz age mix of comedy and dance and cocktails.

Two of the women in Wilding’s picture were known in the gossip columns. Red-haired Zoe Gordon, on the left, was a star of musical theatre and of the 1919 film The Sins of Youth. On the right of the sculptural trio is Sylvia Hawkes, “London’s Cinderella” (she was the daughter of a footman). Her success in The Midnight Follies led to a series of headline-making marriages – first to the heir to Lord Shaftesbury, with whom she scandalously eloped, and subsequently to Hollywood stars Douglas Fairbanks senior, from whom she inherited a $2m fortune, and Clark Gable.

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