With the end of the first World War and the ensuing economic boom of the 1920s, Harper's Bazaar documented the sea change in the culture. A new freedom took hold of the popular imagination as women bobbed their hair and danced to improvisational rhythms— and nearly everyone evaded the strictures of Prohibition—with the arrival of what F. Scott Fitzgerald dubbed "the Jazz Age."

The editors of Bazaar were intent on publishing the period's most distinctive literary voices, including Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, who together penned a piece, "The Changing Beauty of Park Avenue," for the January 1928 issue, that was keenly attuned to the dynamics of wealth, class, immigration, and real estate, which still resonate today. Editor Henry Sell is credited with discovering Anita Loos, whose irreverent novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes debuted as a serial in Bazaar in 1924. Arthur Samuels, who was named editor in the wake of the stock market crash of 1929, was himself a member of the much mythologized Algonquin Round Table, a revolving cast of about 30 wits—mainly writers, editors, and actors—who regularly lunched together. Samuels managed to convince one of its ringleaders, Dorothy Parker, to write short fiction for the magazine, while Bazaar also published other major female talents of the era, including Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West.

Erte's cover for the November 1933 issue of Harper's BAZAAR

Bazaar was committed to giving the look of its pages an equally modern edge. The design was driven primarily by two men. The first was Erté (the pseudonym for the Russian-born French artist Romain de Tirtoff), whose colorful, fluid illustrations were at once whimsical and elegant, and graced more than 200 covers over 21 years. The second was Baron Adolph de Meyer, whom William Randolph Hearst lured away from Vogue in 1921 with a high salary commensurate with his lasting legacy; fellow photographer George Hoyningen-Huene described de Meyer's images as "making every woman look like a vision in a dream or an apparition inside a backlit aquarium." The magazine closed out the decade by forever altering its aesthetic: It added an extra "a" to Bazar, rechristening it Bazaar.

Erte's cover for the November 1920 issue of Harper's BAZAAR.

Excerpt from Virgina Woolf's "Lappin and Lapinova"

Rosalind had still to get used to the fact that she was Mrs. Ernest Thorburn. Perhaps she never would get used to the fact that she was Mrs. Ernest Anybody, she thought, as she sat in the bow window of the hotel looking over the lake to the mountains, and waited for her husband to come down for breakfast. Ernest was a difficult name to get used to. It was not the name she would have chosen. She would have preferred Timothy, Antony, or Peter. He did not look like Ernest either. The name suggested the Albert Memorial, mahogany sideboards, steel engravings of the Prince Consort with his family—her mother-in-law's dining room in Porchester Terrace in short.

But here he was. Thank goodness he did not look like Ernest—no. But what did he look like? She glanced at him sideways. Well, when he was eating toast, he looked like a rabbit. Not that anyone else would have seen a likeness to a creature so diminutive and timid in this spruce, muscular young man with the straight nose, the blue eyes, and the very firm mouth. But that made it all the more amusing. His nose twitched very slightly when he ate. So did her pet rabbit's. She kept watching his nose twitch; and then she had to explain, when he caught her looking at him, why she laughed.

"It's because you're like a rabbit, Ernest," she said. "Like a wild rabbit," she added, looking at him. "A hunting rabbit; a King Rabbit; a rabbit that makes laws for all the other rabbits."

Ernest had no objection to being that kind of rabbit, and since it amused her to see him twitch his nose—he had never known that his nose twitched—he twitched it on purpose.

A model wearing a Chanel dress in the April 1925 issue of Harper's BAZAAR

Excerpt from Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Changing Beauty of Park Avenue"

Beginning in the pool of glass that covers the Grand Central tracks, Park Avenue flows quietly and smoothly up Manhattan. Windows and prim greenery and tall, graceful, white facades rise up from either side of the asphalt stream, while in the center floats, imperma- nently, a thin series of watercolor squares of grass—suggesting the Queen's Croquet Ground in Alice in Wonderland. It is a street for satisfied eyes. A street of unity where one may walk and brood without being distracted by one's own curiosity. …

Park Avenue is first the New Yorker's street. It is full of nuances and suggestions of all New York, but they are shaped and molded into an etched pattern. There are disciplined, cool smells—the smell of hot motors and gusty dust—of violets and brass buttons—globular lights through an apologetic mist—gay awnings in the rarefied sunlight—Sunday bells and rows and rows of icy windows. It is the place to walk, which means that it is an international street—where the trades-people are accustomed to a clientele who need nothing, want nothing, and buy freely because they have large leisure and filled purses. Here shopping is pleasant and expensive and holy. There are foreign chemists with remedies for French-speaking germs, and Dutch florists with bulbs grown only on dikes; and there are corners stuffed with hunting-print hat boxes. Yet there is none of the atmosphere of the bazaar that colors Madison Avenue a block away. These shops are yourself in Paris—in Rome—wherever you'd like to be, without being incontestably reminded that you are somewhere else. It is a street for strutting. It is a street for luncheon in impeccable French restaurants. It is a street to use when in a hurry, and it is a street for dawdling down. It is a street to have friends on at tea-time. I suppose a street could be other things … but in the immortal words of Ring Lardner, "What of it?"

Late at night, dignity departs not from the reproachless lane. It even lends a majesty to the great revolving broom that polishes away imaginary dirt between the hours of three and five—invests the functioning of the Street Cleaning Department with the isolated and pink-lit smallness of a Whistler London night. Occasionally a flying police car or sometimes a fire engine tears past, lost in the black and misty light before the sound is out of your ears—mysterious night-riders hastening to a destiny other than their own, disturbing the peace of a street too alert ever to give a sense of repose.

At one time we have known in a single apartment house a moving-picture star, an heiress, a famous amateur athlete, a publisher, an author, and a friend. It was very convenient and we were sorry when cornice trouble or a delinquent summer or bankruptcy caused them to scatter along the street. Such is this flaming street—widened now until it has become the most colossal thoroughfare in flaming Manhattan. It is known the world over. And yet we heard a well-groomed and cosmopolitan-looking young lady say one day, "Oh, yes, that's the street next to Madison, isn't it?" And she lived in New York!

Excerpt From Vita Sackville-West's "Family History"

"M-M-M, my dear," said old Mr. Jarrold, taking his daughter-in-law for the hundred-and-twentieth time round his museum, "that's the first bit of coal brought up from the pits at Orlestone. Look at it. That's what sent Dan to Eton. That's what made a gentleman of Dan. A dirty lump, I dare say, but worth more than all those cowry-shells I brought back from Java. M-m-m." Mr. Jarrold was such a dear old man that Evelyn Jarrold, his daughter-in-law, looked willingly for the hundred-and- twentieth time at the first bit of coal from Orlestone, and indeed at all the other miscellaneous exhibits in the museum. Mr. Jarrold always seemed to forget that she had been round the museum before. …

[H]e had gone once to Java, in his yacht; but his yacht had been but the outcome of his dirty lumps of coal; he had owned a yacht, because other rich men owned yachts; and the unexpected sorrow of his life, greater even than the sorrow of his son's death in 1916, had been his rejection from the Royal Yacht Squadron. He had been obliged to go round the world flying the blue instead of the white ensign. Evelyn experienced some indignation on his behalf whenever she remembered his humiliation.

A photograph by Baron Adolph de Meyer for the November 1929 issue of Harper's BAZAAR

Excerpt From Dorothy Parker's "Sentiment"

Oh, anywhere,driver, anywhere—it doesn't matter. Just keep driving.

It's better here in this taxi than it was walking. It's no good my trying to walk. There is always a glimpse through the crowd of someone who looks like him—someone with his swing of the shoulders, his slant of the hat. And I think it's he, I think he's come back. And my heart goes to scalding water, and the buildings sway and bend above me. No, it's better to be here. But I wish the driver would go fast, so fast that the people walking by would be a long gray blur, and I could see no swinging shoulders, no slanted hat. It's bad stopping still in the traffic like this. People pass too slowly, too clearly, and always the next one might be—no, of course it couldn't be. I know that. Of course I know it. But it might be, it might.

And people can look in and see me, here. They can see if I cry. Oh, let them—it doesn't matter. Let them look and be damned to them.

Yes, you look at me. Look and look and look, you poor, queer, tired woman. It's a pretty hat, isn't it? It's meant to be looked at. That's why it's so big and red and new; that's why it has these great soft poppies on it. Your poor hat is all weary and done with. It looks like a dead cat, a cat that was run over and pushed out of the way against the curbstone. Don't you wish you were I and could have a new hat whenever you pleased? You could walk fast, couldn't you, and hold your head high and raise your feet from the pavement if you were on your way to a new hat, a beautiful hat, a hat that cost more than ever you had? Only I hope you wouldn't choose one like mine. For red is mourning, you know. Scarlet red for a love that's dead. Didn't you know that?

She's gone now. The taxi is moving and she's left behind forever. I wonder what she thought when our eyes and our lives met.

This article originally appeared in the February issue of Harper's BAZAAR.