The Chocolate Dandies in 1924 continued this trajectory. By 1925, when the offer came for the Paris engagement with La Revue Nègre, she had substantial professional experience, a growing reputation among people in the industry who had seen her work, and no particular reason to believe that her trajectory within the American entertainment system would ever give her the full range of opportunities her talent deserved.
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## La Revue Nègre and the Paris Moment
The specific cultural moment in Paris that La Revue Nègre arrived into in 1925 is important context for understanding both what happened to Baker and what she was navigating.
Paris in the 1920s was experiencing what cultural historians have described as a vogue for things African and African American — an intense, fashionable interest in what French intellectuals and artists described as “primitivism,” a quality they associated with African and African American culture and which they contrasted approvingly with what they saw as the over-civilized, depleted character of post-World War I European culture. The war had killed a generation of European men and had shattered the confident progressivism of the Belle Époque. Something rawer, more vital, more connected to the body and to natural rhythms was what the intellectuals and artists were looking for.
Jazz, as it was being brought to Paris by American musicians and entertainers, was one form in which this desire expressed itself. The Danse Sauvage that Baker performed in La Revue Nègre was another. The banana skirt that became her signature at the Folies Bergère was a third. These were not simply performances; they were performances for a specific audience with specific desires, and Baker was feeding those desires with professional precision.