OPEN POST: 1920s Dinner Party Peckerwood Field Trip Series

Darlings, throw on your pearls and peel yourself off the fainting couch — this Sunday, we’re going somewhere deliciously decadent. Tonight’s setting? A roaring 1920s dinner party that would make Gatsby feel underdressed. There is no specific year — we’re simply in the 1920s, the decade that invented champagne-soaked chaos.

 Arrivals & Aesthetic

The guests arrive in chauffeured Hispano-Suizas and Packards, stepping out in velvet cloaks, chinchilla wraps, and the occasional scandal. Josephine Baker glides in like silk dipped in firelight, fresh from a Paris revue. Ernest Hemingway, still smoldering with youth and trauma, saunters in with a flask of something strong and a story twice as strong. And Cole Porter? He’s already at the piano, turning your indiscretions into sheet music.

Dorothy Parker is parked on a tufted velvet chaise in the corner, armed with a gimlet, ready to dismantle everyone’s ego in ten words or less. “Brevity,” she purrs, “is the soul of lingerie.”

Oscar Wilde’s ghost materializes just in time to whisper to the hostess, “Either this wallpaper goes, or I do.” He stays.

Setting the Scene:

Our party takes place in a Manhattan townhouse with Prohibition-era champagne chilling in clawfoot tubs and enough cigarette smoke to qualify as its own weather system. A gramophone croons out Ain’t Misbehavin’ and Let’s Misbehave in alternating turns. Metropolis plays silently on a silver screen in the drawing room, casting futuristic shadows over the elegance.

The Bright Young Things, imported fresh from London, burst through the door in sequins, pearls, and dangerous laughter. Evelyn Waugh is trailing them with a notebook and judgmental eyebrows.

Fashion Forecast 

The women wear Patou, Lanvin, and Chanel — all dropped waists and raised hemlines. The men are devastating in Savile Row tuxedos and moral decay. Hair is bobbed, eyes are kohl-rimmed, and scandal is applied liberally. Someone’s cousin is in a see-through gown. Someone else’s wife is in someone else’s arms. No one cares.

The Menu 

Oysters Rockefeller

Lobster Thermidor


Waldorf Salad on a silver plate
Roast duck with cherry glaze

Champagne poured from crystal fountains

Flaming Baked Alaska to finish things with a literal blaze

For the 3 a.m. crowd, a breakfast spread: Smoked salmon and caviar on toast points; Eggs Benedict (with extra hollandaise because we’re all decadent hors); Black coffee in porcelain cups so fine they tremble with gossip.

F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald

Conversation Highlights 

Dorothy Parker on modern novels: “This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.” Hemingway, brooding in a corner, mutters: “Write drunk, edit sober. Love drunk, regret sober.” 

Josephine Baker performs an impromptu Charleston that causes three engagements and a fainting spell.

Cole Porter offers to write a song about the hostess’s most recent divorce. Everyone cheers.

A young Hemingway

Evening Entertainment 

There’s a séance in the attic. Tarot in the conservatory. A jazz trio in the basement. And upstairs, in the master bath, someone’s crying — but glamorously.

The Fitzgeralds are fighting again. She’s throwing pearls, he’s quoting himself. They make up halfway through dessert and start dancing barefoot.

 Your Assignment, Should You Choose to Accept It: 

Dress the part. Wear your favorite flapper dress, tuxedo, or absurd vintage accessory.
Choose your alter ego. Are you a disillusioned heiress? A boozy novelist? A jazz-singer-turned-art-thief?

Suggest a guest! Who would you bring to this unhinged, smoke-swathed soirée?

Reading List for the Ride Home: 

The Great Gatsby – Fitzgerald

Vile Bodies – Evelyn Waugh

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes – Anita Loos

The Portable Dorothy Parker – Dorothy Parker

Down and Out in Paris and London – George Orwell

Pack a flask, powder your nose, and come ready to gossip. As Parker herself once said,  

“I like to have a martini,
Two at the very most.
After three I'm under the table,
After four I'm under my host.”

See you tonight, sugarplums.

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Photos: Pinterest, Getty, blogs, unidentified, NY Times, BBC