Paraffin nose jobs. Blinding mascara. “Bicycle face” (think the “Ozempic face” of 1910). As chronicled in Virginia Nicholson‘s “All the Rage: Stories From the Frontline of Beauty,” there’s not much women haven’t done to conform with the aesthetic standards of their day.
Nicholson, the author of six previous books on subjects ranging from Bloomsbury bohemia to 1950s femininity, introduces each chapter of her rollicking history — which focuses on the century between 1860 and 1960 — with a photograph of a woman whose looks epitomize the ideal of her age. Figure-eight corsets and protuberant bustles give way to short skirts and fringe; bobs cede to lacquered beehives. But as much as fashion, hairstyles and body ideals change over time, some things are forever: You’ll be judged for looking like you try, you’ll be judged if you look like you don’t try and you’re never allowed to get old.
Nicholson talked with The New York Times from her native England about bikini pinups, female empowerment and botched 1920s plastic surgeries. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Why did you choose to focus on these particular years?
I wanted to begin in 1860 because it’s the height of the Victorian era. The corset is shaping the body in an extraordinary, outrageous way, but we don’t know what’s underneath. It’s also the moment when photography goes mainstream. Daguerreotypes are no longer for the rich.
And by 1960, we’ve achieved a high point of visual media. Essentially, we’re still looking at each other in two dimensions, in color, just as we were then.
In 1960, fashion also gets the nearest we ever have to being naked. As you take off those horribly uncomfortable corsets and run around liberated in a bikini, you may think: Thumbs up to liberation. But of course, the more clothes you take off, the more you have to worry about what your body looks like.
As you make clear, beauty has always been a means of leverage in a world where one can’t control much.
There’s a beautiful old folk song about the milkmaid who is picked up by a rogue and says, “My face is my fortune.” Beauty was always transactional: What interests me is the tipping point between moral beauty and immoral beauty.
Can you talk a bit about the moral judgments that would have been applied to a woman who showed too much interest in the aesthetic?
In the Victorian era, morality could be measured by an inch of skirt, or a touch of rouge on the cheeks. Women were completely buttoned into their clothes. And you weren’t allowed to see any of them, because the woman’s body was a site of immorality — of temptation.
And of course all those hooks and buttons and fastenings took tremendous labor to do and undo.
And the richer you were, the more covers you had, the more petticoats, the more crinolines and tapes and buttons.
By the 1920s, you get to wear lipstick (and apply it in public). But by that time, there were other sources of shame, because that’s the beginning of surgical interventions. You put on your lipstick, you powdered your nose, you varnished your nails in all the latest colors, yet you stayed very quiet about the face-lift.
Would you say beauty standards have always been dictated by wealth or the perception of wealth?
Not always. The [silent] movie star Clara Bow came from an incredibly deprived background. It’s part of the American rags-to-riches dream: If you have the wherewithal, you can become the best-dressed redhead in Hollywood.
Tell me about one of the book’s heroines, the French plastic surgeon Suzanne Noël.
She was one of the really early cosmetic surgeons. During World War I, she found herself working with the doctors who were pioneering facial surgery at that time — not for beautification, but helping men who’d had their faces shot off.
Then she met the actress Sarah Bernhardt and it dawned on her: She looks younger! She’d had a spot of work done in the States. Suzanne describes it in her memoir: She pulled her own face back and she thought, I can do that.
By the 1920s, there were a lot of working women whose husbands had abandoned them, or who had been widowed or lost money through no fault of their own. They were getting older and being treated unfairly by their employers.
And these women heard about Suzanne Noël. They would go to her and say: “I’ve been thrown out of my job. I can’t make ends meet.” So she sorted out the faces, and they got their jobs back. She very often did this for no money, because she saw it as a feminist act. We’re living in a different world today, but women are still discriminated against for looking old. Men cannot cope with older women. And I know that — I’m 68.
The other thing that set Noël apart is that she was highly competent, in an era when there were many less successful surgeries — like Gladys Deacon’s infamous nose job.
It was early days and people didn’t know what they were doing. They thought: “My face doesn’t look very good. I’ll try pumping something in.” And it didn’t bloody work.
I would have thought it was fairly clear that injecting paraffin into the body would be a problem.
And why they thought it would stay in one place is mysterious, but they kept trying it. Then, by the 1920s, it was so discredited that you got advertisements saying, “We do beauty treatments in our salon without paraffin.”
What were some of the other shocking treatments you came across?
Oh God. The case from 1925. This young woman was about to get married, and was also setting up her own little startup fashion salon. But it was the ’20s, so skirts were getting shorter, and she really hated her legs. She looked up a leg surgeon and told him, “You must do something about my calves.”
It went wrong very quickly. The surgeon cut her legs, took the fat out and trussed them up too tightly in bandages, like a sausage. Very soon, she started to develop gangrene, and he went to her bedside and said, “Unless we amputate both your legs at the knee, you are going to die.” She had a kind of hospital bedside wedding.
The doctor was taken to court and lost his license, and for about three years, cosmetic surgery of all kinds was prohibited in France.
This is a history, but it’s also a very personal book. It opens with an image of you as a child enjoying the transformation of dressing up, and you write about how, in your own life, fashion and beauty have been a pleasure, as well as a source of pain.
I didn’t want this book to be a finger-wagging exercise. I love color and I love clothes and I love jewelry and I love to doll myself up for occasions. I just think it’s the most fun in the world.
Source: nytimes.com
