'Sits you at the dressing table of history: a place of dreams, doubts, self-harm and hopes' -Sunday TimesAt the heart of this history is the female body. The century-span between the crinoline and the bikini witnessed more mutations in the ideal western woman's body shape than at any other period. In this richly detailed account, Virginia Nicholson, described as 'one of the great social historians of our time...' (Amanda Foreman) and a truly brilliant researcher has produced a most remarkable social history revealing the power, the pain and the pleasure involved in adorning the female body.
She asks how custom, colour, class and sex fit into the picture, and shrewdly charts how the advances made by feminism collided with the changing shape of desirability. Full of surprising facts - the feminist plastic surgeon, the radioactive corset - alongside stories of the 'New Women' who discovered freedom by bobbing their hair, those who were the early adopters of trousers, and early Black beauty entrepreneurs, this book chronicles the codes, the contradictions, the lies and the highs of beauty.
Virginia Nicholson shows how the pursuit of beauty can be oppressive but also a way of negotiating the world and that adornment can be a deep pleasure. It's complicated!
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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' -Louisa Young,
Prospect Industry Reviews
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, as Nicholson shows, is that it was never a myth.
I love her writing - Amanda Foreman
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... More interesting than a simple catalogue of beauty's ills would have been. Here, beauty is sometimes an oppressive force, and sometimes a way for women to negotiate their way around other oppressive forces - Sunday Times
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 - Prospect
[Nicholson's]
wonderfully engaging investigation has a feminist quandary at its heart - Harper's Bazaar
Virginia Nicholson's history of modern women's dedication to their appearance is full of ironies... She is particularly good on how a body looks when styled according to the fashions and expectations of an era..
A compelling account of how... women are moulded by dominant ideals - Literary Review
