he year is 1920, the location is 20 Rue Jacob on the left bank of the Seine, Paris. It’s a Friday evening and you are dressed to the nines, cloaked until you walk through the door.
You scurry inside and are greeted by a cult-like chorus of women draped in white cloth and reciting ancient Greek poetry. To your left sit a gaggle of brooding writers, competing with one another to look the most pensive. They have short hair, cut above their ears, they wear the top half of a traditional penguin suit, but skirts where you might otherwise expect to see trousers.
The skirts were a styling choice made for them by a law that forbade women in France to wear trousers “unless the woman is holding bicycle handlebars or the reins of a horse”, (astoundingly, this law was only repealed in 2013). Your host for the evening is the notorious Natalie Clifford Barney, who dances between the groups of artists, poets and actors, her hair long and wild, filled with the secrets of Paris’s queer underworld.