Beauty in Victorian Women's Magazines: Part Two

London Morning & Fall Dress
Lady's Magazine, August 1810

In my second post on beauty in Victorian women's magazines, I'd like to consider how British women's magazines came to focus on fashion and appearance such that the beauty advertisements in my earlier post slotted in seamlessly within an already existing genre of women's print culture. The origins of what we recognise as a women's magazine rest at the end of the eighteenth century, yet it was in the nineteenth century that magazines moved to a central place in popular reading. Part of the reason why magazines became so prolific, profitable and important to advertisers was because publishers began to target women readers as a specific audience.

A small number of titles intended especially for women were published in the eighteenth century, such as the Lady's Magazine or Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex, Appropriated Solely to Their Use and Amusement (1770) (from which we can see a hand-coloured engraved fashion plate here, a feature which the magazine popularised in England). But most periodicals were directed at the household generally or were intended for men, such as the The Gentleman's Magazine (1731). Other magazines of the period had strong affiliations with church groups and were therefore uninterested in discussing fripperies such as clothing and hairstyles.

Court Dress, Gallery of Fashion, July 1794

In the 1790s, a number of specialised publications devoted to fashion began to appear, such as the Gallery of Fashion (1794) and the Magazine of Female Fashions of London and Paris (1798). These magazines encouraged existing magazines for the women's market, such as the Lady's Magazine, to pay greater attention to fashion coverage amid the usual content of short stories, serial fiction, poetry, essays on modesty, advice for wives and mothers, recipes, biographies of famous figures and local and international news reports.

Dress and appearance entered the women's magazine as "fashion" through the inclusion of reports of what was being worn by court ladies in London and in Paris. As Margaret Beetham explains in A Magazine of Her Own?, this type of content "was to become a staple of women's magazines for the next 200 years and has entered deeply into the ideology of gender" (31). From the nineteenth century, then, women have learned through women's magazines and how they present and construct ideas about women's dress and appearance how to be appropriately feminine.

La Belle Assemblee, 1809

La Belle Assemblée or Bell's Court and Fashionable Magazine addressed particularly to the Ladies, which began publication in February 1806 and continued until 1837, was the first popular interest fashion magazine. It was an expensive publication at 2 shillings and six pence for each edition, which was reflected in its elaborate production values and high-quality engraved portraits. In addition to fashion, the magazine also featured intellectual content pertaining to science, biography and political news to develop its female readers' knowledge.  This mixture of article types was common until around the 1820s when La Belle Assemblée, and women's magazines more generally, began to increase the quantity of fashion and domestic articles designed to entertain and intellectual and literary content was reduced.

Young Ladies' Journal, January 1881

While women's status was undergoing a seismic shift through higher education and the opening up of careers outside the home later in the century, many women’s magazines do not mirror these changes and are devoid of content about intellectual matters, education or employment. The Young Ladies’ Journal , which was published from 1864 to 1920, focused on news of Paris fashions, patterns for needlework,  recipes, correspondence, household tips, court gossip, fiction, and sentimental poetry. Like other women's magazines of the time, Katherine Ledbetter argues that the Young Ladies' Journal “models feminine beauty in relation to [a woman's] traditional role in domestic ideology as a potential partner to a young man” (British Victorian Women's Periodicals 135). A woman's beauty, or her ability to cultivate her appearance to fit beauty ideals, were an indicator of her ability to be a successful wife and mother.

Homes Notes, July 1894

One of the most influential books about beauty was published in 1836 and was entitled Beauty; Illustrated Chiefly by an Analysis and Classification of Beauty in Women. The author, Alexander Walker, identified three main kinds of classic beauty in women: the locomotive type, which was “striking and brilliant”; the Vital or Nutritive type which was “soft and voluptuous”; and the Thinking Beauty who displayed “intellectuality and grace”. Walker suggested that the expanded bosom and “general plumpness” of Nutritive Beauty was more aesthetically pleasing than the other types, but these features were also symbolic of women's proper mothering role. Ideas about women's maternal beauty often inspired angelic connotations, as in this cover from Home Notes from 1894 that uses the familiar phrase "The Hand that rocks the Cradle Rules the World" to suggest women's maternal influence on the next generation. (And you can't miss that she's surrounded by nature in the form of flowers and a bird.)

While I am just starting to think about how women's beauty is understood in the Victorian period, there is no doubt that we have abandoned the phase of admiration for the "plumpness" of Nutritive Beauty. Men no longer consider outward signs of a woman's ability to bear and nurture children, such as wide hips or sufficient body fat, as integral to sexual allure. Indeed an extremely thin woman with artificial breasts that may even hinder mothering are what are most often found on the covers of men's magazines today. Though I've yet to look at men's magazines at all, I'm of the understanding that women aren't featured on their covers in the nineteenth century as they are today. How do we move from maternal beauty as an ideal? And how do images of women end up selling magazines for both men and women? These are some of the questions I hope to answer with future work on beauty in Victorian print culture.

Model Girls: Setting up Girls for Judgement

Cindy Crawford’s daughter has revived discussion about the place of girls in high-fashion modelling. Ten-year-old Kaia Gerber has been chosen as the face of Young Versace and one of the launch images, in which she has been posed in a way that recalls her mother’s supermodel shots of the ‘90s, is a world apart from fleecy-clad child models grinning cheekily in the monthly Kmart catalogue.

It beggars belief that there is a Young Versace range that caters to children from newborns to twelve-years-old. I suppose there are wealthy people out there who couldn’t be seen shopping at Target for their kids, but with the scrapes that most kids get into, and their rapid growth, it’s sinfully excessive to be spending thousands on a flimsy skirt.

Yet wealthy people frittering away money is not the most significant thing to consider about Kaia’s modelling work and the visibility of young girls in the fashion industry. Unlike Thylane Blondeau's Vogue shoot last year, in which she wore a full face of make-up, leopard-print clothing and oversize heels, there is no parody of the fashion industry in Kaia’s images. This campaign is designed to appeal both to girls and their mothers (wealthy ones at least, and to foster aspirations in everyone else), and to encourage the process of girls valuing themselves according to how they look and what they buy.

Both men and women can take pleasure in aesthetic objects and the enjoyment of wearing good quality clothing, but it is women who are judged as a result of their appearance in ways that can be crippling. We know that the appearance of female politicians is far more often a subject of discussion in the media than men’s appearance— Tony Abbott’s alarming “budgie smugglers” being the exception.

A fascinating piece by Dannielle Miller at Mama Mia shows that even when women are active in areas in which their appearance should not be relevant, it is their looks that are most often attacked as a way of dragging them down and destroying their authority. Some of the female media commentators interviewed here, and in other articles on this topic, describe extremely hateful anonymous responses, not about what the substance of their opinion, but how they look. Nina Funnell, who writes about a range of women’s issues, and who has spoken out about her own horrifically violent rape, has shamefully received abusive comments suggesting that she was not attractive enough to be raped in any case.

This is what leads me to be critical of images like that of Kaia Gerber. Some might feel that the image is sexualising and is encouraging girls to “grow up too soon”. While these things might be true as well, using a young girl to advertise high fashion in the same way as women are used to advertise products begins the process of judgement even earlier. If mature women are undermined continuously because of their appearance and struggle with the results of this, then girls, who have not yet always been able to forge a self-confident identity, will not have the resources to brush such judgements aside.

Of course, for the past hundred years or more, girls have been able look to images of adult women in the media for an understanding of how they themselves should aspire to be and other girls can serve as the fashion and beauty police to ensure conformity. It is another level of pressure and expectation to have fashionable images of girls that are clothed and stylised as women, something that a 10-year-old cannot be, even if the image of Kaia from the neck-down looks as if she is a woman. The use of teen models often sells an unobtainable ideal of youth to women. However, selling womanhood to girls will surely only foster the same kind of degradation of girls' achievements in light of their looks as women already experience.

Glamour: Women, History, Feminism by Carol Dyhouse

There are two kinds of academic book. The kind you borrow from the library because you are researching a topic and just have to have some kind of authoritative quotation on ‘x’, for which you trawl the index, find your relevant term, persevere with the whole chapter to understand the context, and then move on. And then there is the kind that you willingly spend your own money on, with the express intent of reading it from cover to cover for *gasp* enjoyment. I’m guessing most people find the majority of academic monographs to fall into the first category. I’ve had a good run lately of two books read from beginning to end for leisure, Carol Dyhouse’s history of glamour and Marah Gubar’s history of children’s literature. I’ll leave Gubar for a subsequent post.

Carol Dyhouse was unfairly reduced to a name in my dissertation bibliography until I saw Glamour: Women, History and Feminism in a Zed Books catalogue. She has published several books on women and education, as well as the must-cite-in-literature-review Girls Growing Up in Late Victorian and Edwardian England, Feminism and the Family in England, 1890-1939.

Dyhouse teases out what glamour encompasses, which she argues is not simply beauty or what is fashionable. Glamour speaks “of power, sexuality and transgression” (3). The fascinating first chapter on the origins of glamour shows its movement from a term referring to witchery to draw in ideas of the exotic. Advertisements from 1920s periodicals beautifully complement Dyhouse’s narrative, showing the allure of the orient. For instance, Shem-el-Nessim (The Scent of Araby) suggests “Oriental luxury”, while Wana-Ranee (The Purfume of Ceylon) “distinguishes the woman of taste”. The opening chapter also introduces one the central threads of the story of glamour: the rise and fall of women’s obsession with fur as a sign of luxury.

Glamour then zooms in on the popularisation of glamour on the silver screen, noting a return to shapely figures in the 1930s “with three sets of twin heart-shaped curves: lips, bosom, behind” (38). Cosmetics, and even cosmetic surgery, were integral to carefully constructing the illusion of glamour, along with an attitude of sexual confidence. Dyhouse also considers how British girls and young women were influenced by movie star fashion and lifestyle in magazines such as Girl’s Cinema, Women’s Filmfair, Film Fashionland and Picturegoer. And who said the obsession with the lives of celebrities was a recent phenomenon?

The book reads changes in perceptions of glamour alongside major historical transformations, such as that provoked by the Second World War with the emergence of the “New Look” (“a last look at a vanishing conception of femininity” (83). She also brings class differences to bear in her analysis, especially in considering the differences in how girls would be introduced into society and groomed for womanhood. Dress showed class credentials and gradually the dissolution of formal, matronly dress at the end of the 1950s (formerly a marker of appropriate class membership) allowed girls to wear more youthful clothing.

The sweep through the second half of the twentieth century is equally grounded in social change from beauty pageants to women in the boardroom and grunge. Perhaps revealing my own “period bias”, I was most intrigued by the first two chapters grounded in the 1920s and 1930s, yet the story that Dyhouse has to tell is a must-read from beginning to end in the same way as a gripping novel.

Sometimes popular reads dispense with scholarly rigour, but Dyhouse’s meticulous research is thoroughly detailed in her extensive notes and is evident in the wonderful examples she teases out. I was compelled to look up Evening in Paris perfume, created in 1929 by Bourjois, after reading that it still evokes vivid memories in the women who once wore it as young glamorous things, especially during World War Two. The sites that sell rare, unopened bottles of the scent show that one generation’s concept of glamour remains with them forever, even while ideals of femininity shift around them. Should we be stashing away Jean Paul Gaultier’s “Classique” in its corseted female torso bottles now in preparation for 2070?

Dissing Models, Victorian Style

I bought 300 pounds (in monetary terms) worth of the Girls' Friendly Society's monthly newsletter, Friendly Leaves. I'm sure the bookseller thought that he would never live to offload ten bound volumes of them from 1898-1909. Especially as it was a scientific and technical bookshop in Wales where demand for an Anglican Church girls' group's newsletter was unlikely to be raging. And extra especially because it's not a particularly exciting read. (Quite a few years are edited by Christabel Coleridge, constant reader Kris, so I'm happy to share the tedium around.)

Amidst the preaching, advertisements for workers, and marriage and death notices (it's shocking to see how regularly women died in their twenties and thirties- they have the death column in every issue of a publication for a girl's society), were a few fun gems. The best, from February 1899, begins with an explanation of why the magazine does not include fashion plates (illustrations of the latest clothing styles).

Do you know, girls, we are sometimes asked why we don't have more about 'the fashions' in Friendly Leaves ? I think that it would be a great pity to take up our tiny space with fashion plates and notes, when there are so many nice little penny magazines which give such useful ones. We have got other things to talk about. Home Notes and Home Chat and Mothers and Daughters , and many others, give really nice hints how to make one's things look pretty without too much expense, and the pictures help us to carry the directions out. But oh, my dear girls, how dreadful it would be if sweet pretty maidens really could make themselves look like fashion plates! Do you know that they are nearly all monsters? A real woman's figure ought to be seven times the height of her own head. That is the perfect proportion, but I have seen fashion figures into which you could get ten or even twelve heads without any difficulty. They would not be able to walk in at the door....Then the necks! Some of them look as if the girl's head had been cut off and sewn on again, and had to be kept in place by a tight band. And the waist! But I won't forestall what will be said about that in 'The Way to be Well'.

The description of the illustrated clothing models is none too dissimilar from how many people describe catwalk models today, or from the discussions about Barbie's body weight rendering her unable to menstruate (or walk, quite possibly). I was surprised to see this kind of recognition that the fashion world is not reality and can even be seen as grotesque in a turn-of-the-century publication. Incidentally, 'The Way to be Well' didn't have anything useful to offer about waists, but provides a solemn warning not to place 'pig-styes' and 'manure heaps' close to one's house.