For the flapper there is the opening sequence in Thoroughly Modern Millie where the character draws together a modern 1920 'style by looking in shop windows and magazines . That movie brings together a bunch of fictional types and plays with them even showing how ridiculous they were. Blake Edwards also did that in some other cilms.
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Funny how you mention Biggles when my notion of a World War One flier is David Niven or Errol Flynn from the starkly realistic for its day Dawn Patrol or the pictures of Boelke , Immelmann or Gumeyar. To me Biggles is an idealized hero of youth fiction like Buffalo Bill or Nancy Drew or Dick Tracy. Not Eddie Rickenbacker who had a myth created around him but who remained real and mud splattered. The archetype had been created by then and he decided to live it thereby giving it a real face.

PIT_FACE wrote:
WTF? Who isn't being yer friend? Yer awesome! I'LL KILL EM!!!

They are ALL my friends. I'm the most friend-having sexless person on the earth! (Or I'm in the club. I'm sure it's a big club. :) We can get together and have awkward unattractive orgies.)

We're in agreement Bravo! :D
Going by what Kim said though it prompted me to look for more angles.
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The best trianglation I have for the flapper phenomenon is a book of collected French magazine illustration cartoons from the early to mid 1920s. They were done by contemporary illustrators to comment on the fashions, styles and attitudes of the day. There are a LOT of unique depictions of fashion styles in there that you only see hinted at in photos:
The juicy thing is that these pics were not drawn to illustrate outfits like a model photo or fashion illustration; they were done to show interactions by the normal people of the day using the current sterotypes that existed then.

- So there ARE some flapper-like young ladies in the pics with comments their “wanton, willfull” behaviour. Which means that for whatever reason it WAS a sterotype that existed in some way during the time and it WAS international, not just the USA.
Whether it was more than a sterotype I can't say.

One movie of the time portrays a close precursor of a flapper as a loose girl who hung around Parisian night clubs entertaining the officers. A war memoir paints that picture as well with the flapper dress, bobbed hair and slinky dress laughing it up with red tab staff officers back in Paris while serving officers toughed it out in the trenches.

It's ticky though. The flapper was a young, liberated hedonistic woman in a postwar world, while that version sounds like a prostitute in the previous war torn decade… There could be a relationship in forming the sterotype of the look.

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On this exact note, the character of Sophie in the Somerset Maugham book The Razer's Edge (published in 1944), is a woman who follows this pattern somewhat and it doesn't end well for her- Losing her young husband and child she throws herself Nihilistically into a life of hedonistic excess- promiscuous sex, dancing, parties, and opium adiction. She sinks down in the level of society she moves in and is eventually murdered by an aquanance.
I think a big part of the flapper sterotype in pop-culture wasn't just an equivelent of a 1970s “disco floozie”, “loose woman”, or “gangster moll”, it was a moralistic cautionary tale. In some respects they were seen as “bad women”.
-not surprising since society hated a liberated female.

I'm sure the antics of the “lost generation ” across Europe helped. Hedonistic young women fresh from servicing officers might have gone right on partying in the 1920s. In that day and age very little if anything was thought to separate a liberated woman from a prostitute. And then there was the Berlin cabaret scene and the Harlem Renaissance so plenty of opportunities for young women to hit the clubs and be hedonistic and live and add to the stereotypes.

I'm still a little doubtful that the flapper image was entirely driven by prostitutes. :D

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Speaking of another media image/reality disconect:
The Nerd.

That image has evolved a LOT over the years, but the media version of the nerd has always been a lot more glamorous than the real thing. And funilly enough when people deliberitly go for a “nerdy look” now (it's become almost a fashion thing), what they do is just an immitation of the fictional nerd sterotype. All those self described “nerdy girls” and “nerd boys” are directly influenced by a fictional image and not reality.

Of course the old style geek, nerd, dork kids never went away or suddenly became glamerous, but they HAVE had their identity somewhat appropriated by these people, which irks them a little.
I remember wtaching American Splendor about the awkward Harvey Pekar and his friends. There's a scene whre one of his firneds is excited about the film Revenge of the Nerds because he feels his subculture is finally getting some recognition, but Harvey is cynical, feeling that the image is just being appropriated and nerds will still be socially ostasised as usual.

Then there's the most modern version of this phenonina which was The Big Bang theory.
When I first watched an episode of that it was about Sheldon going back to his mum's hous in Texas and his firneds coming to get him.
I didn't know the characters or what was going on. All I saw were people dressed in extremely fashionale and very well fitting hipster clothes. They seemed articulate and broadly funny, mostly gregarious but one was shy. They all seemed dedicated to getting their gay firend to come back and live with them- he'd run away for some reaon. They were all obviously straight so I thought they'd been homophobic possibily and I was interested that a broad sitcom would tackle that.The gay man's mother seemed like an ex-prostitute or stripper who was extremely interested in the hipsters…

After whatching the episodes in order I realise that wasn't what was happening at all. But the thing is that you can only beleive that they are unfashionable geeky nerds and that Sheldon is straight if you're inducted into that fantasy gradually, because it IS so false.

The pilot episode provides a clearer, more realistic view of the show's premise:
Leonard and Sheldon really do act and look like real nerds in that; badly dressed in out of fashion, ill fitting cheap clothes, only worn for their utility. They're both shy, innexpereinced and yet very pervy. The Penny character is worldy and has all the bravery and forwardness they lack (more like Sheldon's mum in the later episodes). Clearly she will pull them out of their shells and “make men” of them as the series progresses…
Of course the show was rejigged after that.