1926--American Gertrude Ederle becomes the first woman to swim the English Channel. It takes her 14 hours and 31 minutes.
   1926--John Barymore, playing the roll of Don Juan, and also staring Mary Astor and Estelle Taylor, sets a record for the most kisses with a single movie, 127.
   1926--Rudolph Valentino makes Son of the Sheik, and establishes the "Latin lover" film type.
   1926--Greta Garbo makes Flesh and the Devil, playing opposite John Gilbert, and portraying deep desire and passion.
   1926--Clara Bow becomes an overnight sensation in the movie It.
   1926--The British import White Cargo capitalizes on a new form of dealing with the censor, by advertising itself as "banned by Will Hays." (The movie will be remade in 1942 version with Hedy Lamar)
   1926--American women are jailed for appearing on beaches in bathing suits without stockings or sleeves.
   1926--Wharton economist George Taylor proposes the "hemline index," suggesting that a correlation exists between prosperous economic times and higher dress hemlines. Conversely, hemline theory suggests that during a slumping economy dresses and skirts recede down the leg.
   1927--Polish-born Rosaline Klin invents the Kestos bra, in which the two cups are independently supported.
   1927--Mae West is imprisoned for lewdness after cops raid her Broadway show Sex, in what she plays a woman in a Montreal whorehouse.
   1927--Introduction of sound in the movies.
   1928--Director Eric von Stroheim arranges for Gloria Swanson to be whipped in the movie Queen Kelly.
   1928-- The Hays Code bans certain language in films. The taboo words and phrases include "bum," "bitch," "chippy," "mistress," "harlot," "naked," and "prostitute." Forbidden phrases include "it wasn't love," "long, lonely nights," "you were with him all last night," and "twin beds." Other rules: kisses must be less than three seconds long, no thumbing of the nose, no profanity, no slapping a woman's behind, no living out of wedlock, no discussion of pregnancy, birth control, venereal disease, abortion, eugenics, illegitimate children, prostitution, miscegenation, or divorce.
   1928--Director Erich Von Stroheim stages a bordello scene for The Wedding March. It is filmed behind locked doors, and he instructs the actors to go as far as they want. The action infuriates Hays, who attempts to block their insertion into the picture. The result is a trimmed portrayal.
   1928--Louise Brooks plays the Femme Fatale in Pandora's Box.
   1928--Brunuel's Un Chien Andalou introduces graphic physical violence, sexuality, and surrealism to the Art film.
   1928--Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis establishes a "right to be let alone."
   1928--Tom Blake invents the hollow surfboard at Waikiki beach and helps organize the first Pacific Coast Surfriding Championships at Corona del Mar.
   1929--The Dane Benjamin Christiansen makes the first film on demons, Witchcraft through the Ages, which is banned nearly everywhere.
   1929--Men begin to shed the tops of their bathing suits. Eighteen men are fined $1.00 each for exposing their chests on the beach at Coney Island.
   1929--Birth control advocate Margaret Sanger is prohibited from speaking in Boston.
   1929--The brassière and girdle replace the one-piece corset as the primary foundation under women's clothing.
   1929--Kurt Barthel founds the American League for Physical Culture, and opens a naturalist colony at Spring Valley, New York.
   1929--The stock market collapses, ushering in the Great Depression.
   1929--Posture photography become mainstream in Ivy League colleges, where the members of incoming freshmen classes are photographed nude in order to build a posture photograph archive. Posture photography, begun at Harvard in the 1880s, spreads to both men and women's schools and includes Wellesley, Yale, Mount Holyoke, Princeton, Smith, Vassar, Swarthmore, Purdue, and others. The practice continues until the 1970s.
   1930--Massachusetts courts declare two classic novels obscene: Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy and D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover. The National Organization for Decent Literature is formed.
   1930--In Dennett, American courts rule that sex education of adolescents is not obscene.
   1930--Marlene Dietrich provides a glimpse of garters and hose in the movie Blue Angel.
   1930--Hollywood publicists invent the Platinum Blonde, the look of Jean Harlow in Hell's Angles.
   1930--Psychologist J.C. Flugel publishes The Psychology of Clothes in which he advocates a theory of shifting erogenous zones. He theorizes that erogenous zones keep moving because the eye gets exhausted with one vista, and it needs to be replaced by another view to stimulate erogeny.
   1930--In Paris designer Elsa Schiaparelli introduces mix-and-match separates and the backless swimsuit with a built-in bra. The backless swimsuit receives a U.S. patent and promotes a tan without strap marks.