I had held Beauty’s sceptre, and had seen men slaves beneath it. I knew the isolation, the penalty of this greatness. Yet I owned it was an empire for which it might be well worth paying.
—Olivia Shakespear, Beauty’s Hour (1896)
All the Rage is a perfect title for a book about terrible beauty. The phrase means what’s fashionable at a particular time; but rage is a violent, sudden anger, stemming from the same Latin word that gives us rabies – mad, passionate, dangerous. Beauty, and its attainment, preservation and curse, are all things Virginia Nicholson chronicles and analyses in this compelling history spanning a century and focusing on its western, female manifestation.
Nicholson, named after her great-aunt Virginia Woolf, is the granddaughter of Vanessa Bell – to my mind, two of the most beautiful and stylish women of the past century. In her introduction, she reminisces about playing at dressing up in the 1950s at Charleston in clothes from the Victorian and Bloomsbury era. This would have made anyone a dedicated follower of fashion, as well as a devotee of the beautiful.
Nicholson is a specialist in women’s history and culture, the author of, among other books, Perfect Wives in Ideal Homes: The Story of Women in the 1950s, and How Was It For You? Women, Sex, Love and Power in the 1960s. She casts her net wider this time, from mid-Victorian days to the start of the ‘contemporary’ – from corsets and infinite buttons to pedal pushers and pop tops.
Amid massive and unprecedented advances for women ‘into the economic, educational, sexual and political strongholds reserved for men’, a woman’s body progressed too – from the mid-19th century when ‘women’s anatomical realities were refashioned from the exterior, via sharp steel and galling whalebone’ to around 1960, when women were ‘able to appear in public places wearing a bare minimum of clothing.
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