Collection

Louise Brooks

Louise Brooks was the quintessential flapper — a silent-screen actress whose sharp black bob and restless intelligence became the defining image of the Jazz Age. Born in Kansas in 1906, she moved to New York to dance with the Denishawn company before Hollywood beckoned. Her most celebrated work came in Germany: G.W. Pabst cast her in Pandora's Box (1929), where she played Lulu with an unsettling, modern frankness that still feels ahead of its time.

Portrait by Eugene Robert Richee, c. 1928. Public domain (PD-US-no_notice). Wikimedia Commons.