Anne Margaret Daniel

Was the flapper style of the 1920s so liberating?

Women certainly found the bob a welcome change – but with shorter skirts came agonising over diets, depilatories, make-up and dangerous cosmetic surgery

Fashion in the late 1920s. [Alamy] 
issue 25 May 2024

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.

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