Joséphine Baker
I promised a little something about the 1920’s in general and La Baker in particular in an earlier post. Everybody who knows something about her, probably knows about the banana skirt, too - see the accompanying image, found on Flickr. Nicéforo has a lot more nice pictures of Joséphine, although many of them are sadly rather low-res.
My favourite Baker outfit is a feather costume from the same period as the banana skirt. It is interesting to imagine how Joséphine could make such a deep impression on European cultural life with her dances (politically incorrect in any day and age).
Flickr.com is becoming a great resource for images of every conceivable subject, and I often browse it for illustration references. Just searching for certain keywords like “montmartre” and “montparnasse” produces a wealth of tourist snapshots, artistic imagery and old postcard scans. Some might feel that it is confusing and hard to find exactly what you are looking for, since many users don’t bother to tag their pictures with proper search terms. I don’t mind much; it is often more inspiring to find the “wrong” pictures and be forced to use your own imagination to fill the gaps.