You are welcome!
I also enjoyed this album a great deal; kudos to the IMDb for publishing it!
They are beautiful, aren't they?
I am not a fan of the fashion of the time, but it is fascinating to see how much our beauty standards have changed. I tend to prefer victorian-age clothing and beauty (long hair, elaborate dresses..), but the roaring twenties are still an interesting period for at least three reasons:
1) Acting became a job of its own. Before then, during the birth of Cinema, actresses were more or less prostitutes or total amateurs. In the 1920's, filming had become an art form in its own right, and professionalization had been achieved. Those women pictured here were all full-fledged actresses, and some of them were even the stars if their time.
2) They were damn talented. All of them! In the "mute" era, conveying an emotion without the use of words was extremely difficult, and required a complete mastery of one's body. And even in "talky" movies, more often than not, these ladies could almost be considered athletes, performing dangerous stunts, and doing all kinds of stuff most of us would not be able to do.
3) They were independent in every sense of the term. They were earning a lot of money and could dispose of it as they pleased. Being in the film industry also gave them a lot of leeway towards the social conventions of the time; they could be almost anything they wanted, on-screen and off-screen. It is something we don't think of very often in this day and age, but these women, once again all of them, were the embodiment of subversion, long before the counterculture movement. Can you imagine having dinner with them? Courting them? Tickling them?
To connect with what you said, the subject of switching from mute to spoken Cinema could be the object of a book because it is so rich and complex. You are absolutely right, but there are also more than a few examples of ladies who succeeded in the transition from one medium to the other. On that topic, did you watch the French movie The Artist? It is precisely about that.