I am available to promote All the Rage through appearances, interviews and articles. For further information contact: Niamh Anderson at Virago Press Niamh.Anderson@littlebrown.co.uk

Excerpts from All the Rage  

Excerpt 1

from CHAPTER 2 Belle Epoque

Awareness of weight-loss diets had increased in the 1860s when William Banting, the obese executive of a funeral direction company, wrote a best-selling booklet describing how he had lost 46 pounds by giving up sugar, carbohydrates and dairy products. His Letter on Corpulence (1863) has been in print ever since, and his name would become so synonymous with his methodology that for a century afterwards if a person declined pudding they were liable to be met with the question, “Are you banting?”

Domestic bathroom scales were not yet available; anyone who wanted to check their weight would need to find a public penny slot machine. These were popular as fairground amusements, and were often installed on the platforms of train stations. But by the 1880s there were signs that the goalposts were shifting. For women aspiring to be beautiful, it was no longer enough to pop in a bust-improver, tuck in a pad of false hair, tighten your stays and dab on some discreet powder. Women were being urged to modify their bodies, to edit what nature had given them. The intrinsic character of a woman’s body was beginning to seem questionable, indeterminate – and at the mercy of others.

Certain interventions were being introduced, with the potential to improve a lady’s appearance dramatically. “Those persons afflicted with large noses may be glad to learn of a method of reducing their proportions…”, wrote Baronne Staffe. She did not elaborate, but may have been alluding to the advances in cosmetic rhinoplasty being pioneered in America at that time by the otolaryngologist John Orlando Roe. Refinements in the art of anaesthesia were also opening the door to surgeons offering painless procedures to people with protruding ears, or wrinkles. And relief was in sight for the hairy. Dr George Henry Fox from New York had observed at first-hand the misery that women could endure from unwanted hair. They had come to him in distress, after years spent fruitlessly trying to tweezer out thousands of excess hairs. In his short book on the subject, The Use of Electricity in the Removal of Superfluous Hair (1886), Dr Fox described the hopeless predicament of the hirsute woman:

This abnormal growth of hair is not always a trifling matter… It is very apt to affect her disposition, and to injure her prospects in life, especially if she be young and unmarried…

Fox gave instances of women driven insane by their hairiness, and argued that his remedy could be life-changing. Though his procedure – electrolysis – was expensive, laborious and painful it produced impressive results. And it was permanent!

Excerpt 2

from CHAPTER 4 Jazz Age

From 1925, the headlong rise to fame of the American-born dancer and entertainer Josephine Baker can be partly attributed to her risqué adoption of a skirt made from bawdy bunches of fake bananas that was to become her trademark on-stage costume. That, and little else. 

France was a haven for African Americans like Josephine, who had grown up in the heavily segregated south: the world divided between ‘whites only’ and ‘Blacks’, with the ever-present threat of the Klan. In Paris, by contrast, you could share space with white people in bars and bistros; in the theatre, you could sit in the stalls. And yet a sinister strand of racism accompanied this tolerance. Paris, it turned out, was crazy about so-called Black culture. In 1925, the Exposition des Arts Décoratifs presented a show of African statuary which influenced a generation of artists. Jacques-Emile Blanche, Cocteau, Rouault, Picasso and Apollinaire appropriated motifs from tribal art and extolled the ‘exotic’ and ‘natural’ attributes of contrasting civilizations. One journalist wrote, “Josephine Baker, our lives on the banks of the Seine were weary and depressing before you came along. In the eyes of Paris, you are the virgin forest.” Shockingly, he added: “You bring to us a savage rejuvenation.”

Baker’s lithe body, and fronds of black hair licked into place against her skull, made her fascinating to photographers, and her dark beauty encircled with clusters of yellow fruit quickly became iconic. You could buy a doll in a banana skirt; there were Josephine cocktails, and Josephine swimsuits. Alice B. Toklas invented a banana dessert and named it ‘Custard Josephine Baker.’ Though Baker was herself trying to lighten her skin – vigorously anointing herself with lemon juice – she now lent her name to Bakerskin, a lotion formulated for skin-darkening, as well as to Bakerfix, a hair pomade for lacquering those kiss curls. Chic Parisiennes, influenced by her extraordinary talent and sexy jazz age electricity, slicked down their hair and tinted their skin several shades darker, allowing them to act out a version of Blackness, based on colonial fantasy, racist stereotypes and contemporary cultural allusions. By 1927 Josephine Baker was earning more money than any entertainer in Europe. 

Baker remains controversial. Her ‘Danse Sauvage’ can be seen as conforming to a racial stereotype. But there is another view, that sees Baker as knowingly acknowledging and celebrating her race, sexuality and exceptional, modern beauty, while also creating a new female narrative. Either way, nobody has ever put Black beauty on the map with quite the panache Josephine Baker did.

Excerpt 3

from CHAPTER 7 New Look

How could any woman ever match up to the projections of male fantasy? John Berger’s now famous comment (in Ways of Seeing, 1972) that ‘Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at…’ is a distillation of his earlier discourse, in which he explains the pressures on women: ‘A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself.’ This image was a phantom, a male projection, with the reality lost in translation. 

Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually.

Margaret Atwood puts it even better: ‘You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.’

The male gaze – that pervasive, macho, heterosexual perspective which treated women as sexual exhibits on display for their pleasure – was comprehensively reinforced and internalised in the mid-twentieth century. By 1960, when Betty Friedan was writing The Feminine Mystique (1963), she was able to observe, despairingly, that American women “could desire no greater destiny than to glory in their own femininity.” The female imagery of this era was confirmation of a dehumanising cycle, by which men objectified women, and women sought to be objectified because that was what men wanted. It was inescapably omnipresent. Everywhere, the sellers confronted the buyers. Everywhere, women were ambushed by beauteous blondes. As they walked to work, travelled home on the train, queued at the fishmonger’s, strolled on the promenade or met their date at the cinema, their eyes met those of other women: bolder, brighter, bustier women, with slenderer waists and redder lips.

These images of perfection flaunted themselves across the full range of society: from pubs to hairdressing salons, on public transport and in the newspaper, in shops and picture palaces, from advertisement hoardings and illustrations, photo-features and covers, in colour and black and white, the women smiled back. The starlets and socialites, the models and celebrities appeared to rejoice in the visibility of their gleaming limbs, their blemish-free skin and buoyant breasts. All of them were white, and under five foot six. They had more perfect teeth, longer lashes, glossier hair, prettier noses. Compared to the onlookers they had better romances, a better social life, better families, better food and better material possessions; so they were happier too.

Gallery

PREVIEWS and ENDORSEMENTS

Amanda Foreman, author of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire

Virginia Nicholson is one of the great social historians of our time. No one else makes history this fun…

In All the Rage, the incomparable Virginia Nicholson, shaped and armed by her unconventional childhood among the Bloomsbury Set, is unafraid of skewering the social conventions that bound her generation. The tragedy of the myth of beauty, Nicholson shows, is that it was never a myth. I love her writing.

Justine Picardie, author of Coco Chanel

A scintillating survey of the changing face of beauty, examining a century of history that saw women’s bodies become a battleground for emancipation. This encompassing account is bold in its scope, yet filled with intriguing details and thoughtful original analysis of the codes, conventions and contradictions of female fashion and beauty

Times, Sunday Times

Virginia Nicholson is a particularly fun social historian, and now she has turned her beady eye on the history of female beauty.

Financial Times

In this detailed account, social historian Virginia Nicholson examines the revolution in the perceived ideal of the western woman’s body that played out in the century between the crinoline and the bikini.

Sadie Stein in The New York Times Book Review

Nicholson 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.

Laura Jacobs in The Wall Street Journal

Beauty is a double-edged sword that cuts women every which way. Enter All the Rage by the social historian Virginia Nicholson. Ms. Nicholson divides her book into seven chapters named for the eras in her 100-year history. Brilliantly, she’s chosen a woman to symbolize each era, and begins each chapter by deconstructing a photograph of the standard-bearer: How is she dressed? What undergarments might she be wearing? What is her face saying? Her setting, her posture, her position? The analysis is intimate. Balancing wide-ranging research with lively storytelling, Ms. Nicholson doesn’t merely humanize history, she makes it fun.

Steve Donoghue in Open Letters Review

Nicholson is everywhere intensely readable on the subject of what ‘all the rage’ actually cost the women who had to obey its dictates… [Her book] is full of pictures, but it’s Nicholson’s prose that illuminates it throughout. The subject of the social forces behind fashion has of course had a small library of books written about it, but this is the liveliest and shrewdest example to appear in the popular market so far this year.

Laura McLaws Helms recently featured an interview on her fashion, design and cultural history site, Sighs and Whispers https://laurakitty.substack.com/

As the granddaughter of artist Vanessa Bell and great-niece of Virginia Woolf, Nicholson was raised immersed in beauty and a lineage of strong women…. All the Rage takes on a vast expanse of time, expertly entwining mostly primary sources from women of all economic backgrounds and lifestyles. Cosmetics, plastic surgery, fashion, corseting, exercise, technology, photography and cinema are just some of the subjects Nicholson alights on, producing an eminently readable journey through the many demands and pressures made on women in the name of beauty.

Ysenda Maxtone Graham in the Daily Mail

In her marvellously readable book of ‘stories from the frontline of beauty’ spanning the years from 1860 to 1960, Virginia Nicholson gives us an unforgettably rich and varied tapestry of the development of female beauty anxiety… What gives this book its shape and structure as strong as an Edwardian corset is Nicholson’s inspired idea of opening each decade’s chapter with a photograph to sum up the gold standard of beauty for that decade…

Oriole Cullen in FT Weekend

An authority on women’s lives whose previous works have delved into sex, love and power in the 1960s and domestic life in the 1950s, Nicholson brings her insightful historical gaze to the female body, continuously contorted and manipulated to fit prevailing standards of beauty. In the process, she empathetically unravels the contradictions and incongruities that uphold the unending search for the “perfect” face and figure… This is not just a book about women’s clothing, but their relationship with appearance and the external forces that shaped it, from corsets and cosmetics to diets, exercise and plastic surgery. Nicholson animates the story by including not just her own recollections (this is a “personal book” she says), but a rich array of first-hand accounts and stories… All the Rage is a fascinating and enjoyable investigation which, for all its focus on history, holds up a mirror to today’s realities too.

Anne Margaret Daniel in The Spectator

All the Rage is a perfect title for a book about terrible beauty… Beauty, and its attainment, preservation and curse, are all things Virginia Nicholson chronicles and analyses in this compelling history spanning a century and focussing on its western, female manifestation… Nicholson is a specialist in women’s history and culture… [she] creates a fascinating kaleidoscope of information that all feels connected, as if the reader were a woman in that time… The decades since [the 1960s] have not answered the question with which Nicholson leaves us: ‘Will we ever declare a truce on the beauty front line, that danger zone which for so long has kept women from parity and peace of mind?’ Indeed, modern times only seem to vex the question further, and All the Rage gives you some very good ideas as to why this is.

Sarah Ditum in The Sunday Times

Nicholson’s lively, intimate history of beauty wants us to take a more sympathetic view of the women who engage in the often-condemned and sometimes dangerous quest for gorgeousness. All the Rage sits you at the dressing table of history: a place of dreams, doubts, self-harm and hopes. [It is] more interesting than a simple catalogue of beauty’s ills would have been. Here, beauty is sometimes seen as an oppressive force, and sometimes a way for women to negotiate their was around other oppressive forces… It is good to be reminded that my generation did not invent self-commodification. We merely democratised it - the pains as well as the pleasures… May future historians treat [this generation] as sensitively as Nicholson treats her subjects here.

Anna Carey in The Irish Times

Virginia Nicholson has written a brilliant new book telling the story of how women’s lives were transformed by fashion from the 1860s to the 1950s… Nicholson, the author of four brilliant social histories of women’s lives in the 20th century, does this through the experiences of real women… This ensures that the big ideas she explores are always rooted in fascinating and in some cases heartbreaking stories… You don’t have to be, as I am, passionate about fashion to enjoy this hugely enjoyable and thought-provoking book. Insightful, engaging and sometimes very funny, it’s an important reminder of what Virginia Woolf told us back in 1928: that fashion is anything but trivial.

Louisa Young in Perspectives

Virginia Nicholson’s examination of the Western world’s relationship with female beauty, and with the industries and culture that have built up around it, is very piercing indeed. She has written fascinatingly before about female history… In All the Rage, she extends the territory of of female experience both chronologically… and topically.

This is no rage-filled rant about the evils of high heels and the stupidity of women for putting up with them, nor a fourth-wave feminist declaration about the moral right to be fat or ugly without being ‘shamed’. It opens with a lyrical reminsicence about her childhood joys of dressing-up boxes, of art and decoration and musty velvet sleeves and leftover greasepaint; about the adventure of clothing and hairstyles and makeup, of sewing and making - of how we present ourselves and our bodies.

The journey… is told with a constant eye on the politics, society, religion and male requirements which shape it…

The arc Nicholson draws is convincing…This is a fascinating book: funny, unexpected, forgiving, political, personal, glamorous and yes, quietly, angry. Read it for the amazing stories; stay for the self-knowledge. Or the Revolution.

Marie-Claire Chappett in Harper’s Bazaar

Virginia Nicholson, the acclaimed writer and social historian, has long viewed fashion as the ideal tool through which we can examine social mores. ‘What are our aspirataions? What are our beliefs? It is all there in how we present ourselves,’ she says. Her wonderfully engaging investigation has a feminist quandary at its heart. Was the radical rising of hemlines really a wholly positive revolution? Certainly, the physical exposure of electric lights, photography, lower necklines and shorter skirts also led to greater anxiety about women’s bodies and often drastic measures to address them. ‘Freedom from petticoats came with a price tag,’ she observes.

Sophie Oliver in the Literary Review

Greater liberty in one aspect of women’s lives was often matched by new kinds of coercion in what they wore and how they looked. Virginia Nicholson’s history of modern women’s dedication to their appearance is full of ironies like this… She is particularly good on how a body looks when styled according to the fashions and expectations of an era… All the Rage is a compelling account of how… women are moulded by dominant ideals.