Lady Gaga might think she has invented outlandish behavior, late-night drinking and wandering around in your underwear, but I gotta tell you, she’s about 90 years behind the curve on this one…

As one of the central characters in the great Jazz Age classic the Great Gatsby remarked: “I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.” (It was actually Fitzgerald himself who coined the term Jazz Age, but I digress…While the US was trying to keep people away from the evils of alcohol with nation-wide Prohibition until 1933, entertainers, musicians, poster-artists and authors were imbibing like there was no tomorrow…

Women wore their hair short, either slicked back or in a bob, and men – no strangers to fashion trends – were just as elegant, with fine grooming that often included a care-fully waxed moustache. Next week’s Oscar contender The Artist is full of some of the best fashions of the twenties … and if I look into my fashion crystal ball, I would venture to guess that Paris Fashion Week in July will be full of flapper-inspired clothing

Actually, when I was looking to see when Paris Fashion Week really was, I ran into a site called fashionweekdates.com. I loved it – hysterical writing, great images (although not that many), and fun fun fun…

“We really recommend a trip to “Paris”. The Parisians are very cool if you do your best to speak French, which you’ll probably suck at due to all the verbs and of course the pronounciation, which sounds like you’re choking yet somehow sounds pretty good. 

One of the things you can do in Paris is see pigeons in the park eating grain, which is WONDERFUL in Paris, because the birds all chirp in French, although they have a horrible accent, making them the mockery of one another, which is odd because they’re all French. ” Click HERE, For more!

A little closer to home, the Roaring Twenties are screeching into Toronto’s Bata Museum with an exhibition called Hells, Hemlines and High Spirits

Open until June 2012, the exhibition is described as focusing on the wardrobe and widening horizons of the “New Woman” and looks at how the myriad influences of the period such as cinema, jazz clubs, and world travel influenced the shape of fashionable footwear. We might even be tempted to go over the Maginot Line between Quebec and Ontario to see it!