All the rage Stories from the frontline of beauty : a history of pain, pleasure, and power 1860-1960

Virginia Nicholson

Book - 2024

"Who decides what is fashionable? What clothes we wear, what hairstyles we create, what color lipstick we adore, what body shape is "all the rage". The story of female adornment from 1860-1960 is intriguingly unbuttoned in this glorious social history. Virginia Nicholson has long been fascinated by the way we women present ourselves--or are encouraged to present ourselves--to the world. In this book, we learn about rational dress, suffragettes' hats, the Marcel wave, the Gibson Girls, corsets, and the banana skirt. At the centre of this story is the female body, in all its diversity--fat, thin, short, tall, brown, white, black, pink, smooth, hairy, wrinkly, youthful, crooked, or symmetrical; and--relevant as ever in this... context--the vexed issues of body image and bodily autonomy. We may even find ourselves wondering, whose body is it? In the hundred years this book charts, the Western world saw the rapid introduction of new technologies like photography, film, and eventually television, which (for better and worse) thrust women--and female imagery--out of the private and into the public gaze."-- more