A change of some sort had undoubtedly taken place

This susceptibility to impressions had been his undoing, no doubt. Still at his age he had, like a boy or a girl even, these alternations of mood; good days, bad days, for no reason whatever, happiness from a pretty face, downright misery at the sight of a frump. After India of course one fell in love with every woman one met. There was a freshness about them; even the poorest dressed better than five years ago surely; and to his eye the fashions had never been so becoming; the long black cloaks; the slimness; the elegance; and then the delicious and apparently universal habit of paint. Every woman, even the most respectable, had roses blooming under glass; lips cut with a knife; curls of Indian ink; there was design, art, everywhere; a change of some sort had undoubtedly taken place. What did the young people think about? Peter Walsh asked himself.

—Mrs Dalloway (1925)


Steven Meisel for Vogue (2007)
I came upon this 20s-inspired photoshoot on the same day I read the above passage, and was struck by how impossible it is to recreate the feel of the 1920s. No matter how much one studies old photographs, newspaper clippings, magazine articles, museum exhibits, silent films — no matter how much one tries to replicate the fashions and aesthetics — the sense of a fashionable London street a hundred years ago can never live again.

But I think perhaps 1920s cloaks should make a comeback.