Globalizing Beauty ― Consumerism and Body Aesthetics in the Twentieth Century

Beauty matters. It influences how people view themselves and others in society, and it guides how people spend money to maintain or transform their appearance through fashion, cosmetics, and surgery as well as diet, exercise, and other lifestyle choices. While it is assuredly not objective, neither is it only in the eyes of the beholder, for it impacts everything from the course of individual careers to the shape and substance of collective social and political structures. To study beauty is to go to the heart of modern consumer societies; however, the study of beauty as a historical, sociological, and anthropological phenomenon is still in its relative infancy. This volume aims to advance our understanding of beauty's role in modern consumer societies by bringing together fresh scholarship that addresses a common set of questions from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including especially history, but also black studies, women's studies, German studies, sociology, and anthropology. Covering historical developments, key research problems, beauty norms in interwar Europe, and appropriations and agency in Africa and Asia from the colonial period to the present, this is a wide-ranging and comprehensive examination of a key piece of global cultural history.