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sad on account of the war,” she began, “for Germany is fighting and Renee”—a friend, perhaps a suitor—“is there … there is a revolution in Paris and Anibal”—another beau?—“is there. Silvio”—yet another smitten friend—“is stuck in France.” Gordon pondered the fate of all the smartly dressed men who had courted her in Rome just a few months before and worried that the war would consume all of her “bounty of beaus.”
    In the days before their departure for America, Gordon and Tommie watched with great emotion as ten thousand Swiss soldiers swore an allegiance to God and country and marched off into the great unknown. Mother and daughter then managed to catch the last, overcrowded train from Geneva to Paris. Packed like sardines into ordinary coach cars, they endured a nineteen-hour journey and had to negotiate their way around vast crowds at the Gare de l’Est. “Paris has changed!” Gordon wrote in her diary. “There’s no one on the streets and lights are not burning.”
    Though the German army was fast moving west, Tommie and Gordon found time for one last whirlwind shopping expedition at the houses of Worth, Poiret, and Patou. They then caught a ferry to England, wound their way up by train to Liverpool, and boarded the RMS Olympic for a safe return to New York. For now, their European adventure had drawn to a close.
    Though she claimed no formal training as an artist, back in the United States, Gordon’s vast knowledge of continental painting, steady hand at the drawing board, and—perhaps most important—extensive network of well-placed friends and acquaintances soon drew her to the attention of Heyworth Campbell, art director for Condé Nast’s various high-end publications, including Vanity Fair and Vogue.
    Headquartered in a stylish office suite (Mrs. Nast herself chose the decor—an art deco interior very much in line with new trends in architecture and design), Campbell and his boss, Frank Crowninshield, drew on the talents of a wide circle of friends, including Dorothy Rothschild (later, Dorothy Parker), who had not yet become a leading light of the Algonquin Round Table, and Ted Shawn and Ruth St. Denis, the celebrated husband-and-wife team whose company, Denishawn, pioneered modern dance in America.
    Through associates in New York, Gordon managed to snare an appointment with Campbell in September 1915. Something about her style, which captured the vibrant colors, modernist flair, and energy of Parisian couture, meshed with the cultural project under way at Nast headquarters, and within a month, she was a regular freelance contributor to their magazines. Over the next ten years, Conway worked with ease to convey to millions of people on both sides of the Atlantic the outline of the New Woman: elegant and lean, tall and linear, alluring yet remote. It was a hard act to follow.
    Strange, then, that neither Conway’s name nor her work ever stuck in the public mind quite as tenaciously as that of her chief rival, John Held. 4 Though their designs would go a long way in determining how Americans in the 1920s and long after would “see” the flapper, Gordon Conway and John Held couldn’t have been more different. Graceful and chic, Conway was to the manor born—an urbanite and a sophisticate who drew the flapper with an air of profound elegance. Held, on the other hand, was a wrangler. Born and bred in Utah, he was a westerner and a maverick.
    An early friend of Harold Ross’s—the two men attended high school together; Ross edited the school newspaper, and Held was its staff cartoonist—Held learned the crude art of sketching andwoodblock printing from his father, John Held Sr., an eclectic musician who imbued in his namesake a love of regional crafts and art.
    In 1910, Held—all of twenty-one years old, with little more than a high school education and $4 to his name—struck out for New York City, where, like so many young artists and writers converging on Gotham,