Good news: in the 1920s you could finally get a facelift. Bad news: the only anaesthetic was three cocktails!
THE fate that Phyllis Noble, a Lewisham teenager in the 1930s, dreaded more than anything was turning into her mother. The poor woman, bankrupt and exhausted from years of domestic drudgery, had false teeth and bulging varicose veins.
Phyllis was worried sick that her own breasts weren’t developing properly. She asked her school friend Anita if she could give her a quick look at her breasts, just to compare them. On their way home from school, they went into the public lavatories in Lewisham. ‘ Anita’s breasts looked delectable,’ Phyllis recalled, ‘ rather like party blancmanges each topped with a bright pink cherry.’
Anita explained to Phyllis that ‘if you want them to grow, you need to rub and pull them like this.’ From that day on, the girls regularly stopped off in the public lavatories, took off their school tunics, and worked on ‘ the enjoyable task of breast development’.
In her marvellously readable book of ‘stories from the frontline of beauty’ spanning the 100 years from 1860 to 1960, Virginia Nicholson gives us an unforgettably rich and varied tapestry of the development of female beauty anxiety.
Her title ‘All The Rage’ is a clever double-entendre, suggesting both ‘the height of fashion’ and a lot of angry women. The subtitle’s key word, ‘frontline’ implies the female body as a battleground, which indeed it was — and is.
Rubbing and pulling one’s breasts in a public WC was mild, compared with some agonising routines. In the 1920s young Diana HomanHunt had two bossy grannies. One forced her to have her shoulders buckled into a canvas harness to prevent bad posture. The other made her remodel her jaw by chewing bones and drinking Bovril through the spout of a teapot.
More shocking to read about are the treatments women actively volunteered for: treatments which often went disastrously wrong.
In 1903, the American heiress Gladys Deacon had her nose injected with paraffin wax. ‘ The wax wandered, hardened and clumped,’ Nicholson writes, ‘ producing abnormal, knotty lumps under the skin.’ The disfigurement didn’t stop the Duke of Marlborough marrying her in 1921. Other commonly used fillers were ivory balls, lanolin, beeswax, silk fabric, epoxy resin, rubber, ox cartilage, and glazer’s putty.
When the craze for facelifts took off in the 1920s, clients required a cocktail before the operation, a cocktail after the operation and ideally one during it, plus ‘a phonograph playing a jazz tune’. The French surgeon Dr Charles Dujarier performed a catastrophic operation on a young model called Suzanne Geoffre, who longed for thinner legs to please her fiancé.
Dujarier removed muscle as well as fat, so the wound could not heal. The limb had to be trussed tightly, ‘like a sausage’. It started to turn grey with gangrene, and had to be amputated. Luckily her fiancé agreed to a bedside marriage on the day before the operation.
What gives this book its shape and structure as strong as an Edwardian corset is Nicholson’s inspired idea of opening each decade’s chapter with a photograph to sum up the gold standard of beauty for that decade.
We start with Princess Alexandra of Denmark, photographed in 1860 in her checked dress over a crinoline. Her corset, ‘imposing its rigid form on the flesh beneath, is like the shell of a crustacean, encasing a soft, edible delicacy’.
The corset did not make a woman thinner; ‘it redistributed her fatness, pushing it around into whatever position suited the fashion of the day.’ The Victorian woman, Nicholson writes, was ‘gift- wrapped, promising divine satisfaction to the prospective purchaser’ — the Prince of Wales in Princess Alex’s case.
Via Lillie Langtry in her bustle, ‘a reticulated bottom-enhancer’, we proceed to Lady Diana Cooper (nee Manners), flaunting ‘the body of a real woman’ on the front of Tatler in 1910. You actually give a sigh of relief as you see the female body at last allowed to breathe out, after those trussed-up decades.
BUT as Nicholson emphasizes — and this is the gist of her book — ‘emancipation was skin-deep’. Because from that moment on, ‘ the corset was internalised in the form of dieting’, as the fashion historian Valerie Steele put it. The photograph of Freda Dudley Ward taken in 1920 depicts her as ‘an exquisite shrimp’, ‘an undernourished adolescent’.
What a contrast, ten years later, is the photo of Prunella Stack, a ‘Modern Girl’. The emphasis had turned to health over beauty; the pin-ups of the day swam lengths and touched their toes 20 times before breakfast.
The 1940s are summed up by Betty Grable with her perfect legs; the wartime message was ‘Beauty is a Duty’. The 1950s are summed up by Brigitte Bardot in her bikini with pointy cups, on Cannes beach. That was the decade of terrifying beauty treatments, such as the Rallie Home Massage Belt, and the Turkobath — a plastic cape you attached to the top of the bath, turning it into a steam cabinet.
As Nicholson wryly asks finally: ‘Will we ever declare a truce on the beauty frontline, that danger zone which for so long has kept women from parity and peace of mind?’
The Gen Z ‘body positivity’ movement might be a step in the right direction. Its aim is to teach us neither to love our body, nor to hate it — just to live in it, peacefully and acceptingly. Judging by the torment today’s girls go through, looking at their thinner peers on social media, that body-positive utopia has not yet materialised.