For the male contingent of the Bright Young Things who bestrode the 1920s, carrying powder compacts and lipsticks came with a heavy penalty. If found wandering around central London with said accoutrements, they were liable to be charged with importuning persons for immoral purposes and sentenced to three months in prison. But these “painted boys,” as they came to be known in the English tabloids, were not easily cowed.
Many of them had already been persecuted during World War I for their avowed pacifism and were hardened by the experience. John Rothenstein, who directed the Tate Gallery, in London, for nearly 30 years, saw their imprint of effeminacy as “the defiant assertion of the dandified intellectual (or ‘aesthete’ as he was called) in the face of the formerly hectoring athlete, or ‘hearty.’”
