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
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  • All the Rage: Power, Pain, Pleasure: Stories from the Front Line of Beauty, 1860-1960

    Virginia Nicholson

    Virago, pp. 519, £25

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.

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