Context

Author
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born on September 24, 1896, and named after his ancestor Francis Scott Key, the author of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Fitzgerald was raised in St. Paul, Minnesota. He was apparently a very intelligent child but he did poorly in school and was sent to a New Jersey boarding school in 1911. Despite being a mediocre student there, he managed to enrol at Princeton in 1913. Academic troubles and apathy troubled  him throughout his time at college, and he never graduated, instead enlisting in the army in 1917, as World War I neared its end. After his time in the Military Fitzgerald fell in love with his wife Zelda who nearly canceled their wedding because of how little money Fitzgerald owned until he released This Side Of Paradise which turned him into a literary sensation. This is quite possibly where the insparation for Jay Gatsby's character came from as Gatsby is also a ex military man who falls in love with a woman with high materialistic needs.

History and Fashion
In 1920's America - known as the Jazz Age, the Golden Twenties or the Roaring Twenties - everybody seemed to have money. The nightmare that was the Wall Street  Crash of October 1929, was inconceivable right up until it happened. The 1920’s saw a break with the traditional set-up in America. The Great War had destroyed old perceived social conventions and new ones developed.
The young set themselves free especially, the young women. They shocked the older generation with their new hair styles and the clothes that they wore were often much shorter than had been seen and tended to expose their legs and knees. The wearing of what were considered skimpy beach wear in public could get the flappers, as they were known, arrested for indecent exposure. They wore silk stockings rolled just above the knee and they got their hair cut at male barbers. The President of Florida University said the low cut gowns and short skirts "are born of the devil they are carrying the present generation to destruction".