Globalizing Beauty Consumerism and Body Aesthetics in the Twentieth Century

Beauty matters. Throughout the world, more and more people from all walks of life spend time and money to make themselves beautiful because beauty expresses identity and shapes status and success. Whether white or black, male or female, young or old, gay or straight, working- or middle-class, Western or non-Western, democratic or fascist, people everywhere have adopted a central maxim of the twentieth century: everyone can be beautiful, and everyone should become beautiful. This volume tracks the historical roots and meanings of modern beauty cultures in the twentieth century, drawing on examples from Europe, North America, the Near East, Asia, and Africa.

Hartmut Berghoff is Director of the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC, USA and Professor of Economic and Social History at the University of Göttingen, Germany. He most recently co-edited the book Business in the Age of Extremes: Essays in Modern German and Austrian Economic History.
 
Thomas Kühne is the Strassler Family Professor in the Study of Holocaust History at Clark University, USA. His most recent book is Belonging and Genocide: Hitler's Community, 1918–1945.

Introduction: 'It Makes Princes of Those Who Have It': Beauty and Consumerism in the Twentieth Century; Hartmut Berghoff and Thomas Kühne
PART I: BASIC DEVELOPMENTS AND KEY PROBLEMS
1. The Global and the Local in the Beauty Industry: A Historical Perspective; Geoffrey Jones
2. Consuming Bodies: The Commodification and Technification of Slenderness in the Twentieth Century; Ulrike Thoms
3. Medial Beauty: Three Sociological Theses on Late Modern Body Aesthetics; Michael R. Müller and Anne Sonnenmoser
4. The Harm in Beauty: Toni Morrison's Revisions of Racialized Traditional Theories of Aesthetics in The Bluest Eye; Althea Tait
5. Queer Beauty: Image and Acceptance in the Expanded Public Sphere; Jennifer V. Evans
PART II: COSMOPOLITAN ATTEMPTS IN INTERWAR EUROPE
6. Miss Germany, Miss Europe, Miss Universe: Beauty Pageants in the Popular Media of the Weimar Republic; Mila Ganeva
7. Recognition for the 'Beautiful Jewess': Beauty Queens Crowned by Modern Jewish Print Media; Kerry Wallach
8. The Rise of Fashion Forecasting and Fashion Public Relations, 1920–1940: The History of Tobé and Bernays; Véronique Pouillard
9. 'The Beauty Soap of Film Stars': Lux Toilet Soap, Star Endorsements, and Building a Global Beauty Brand; Christina Burr
10. Beauty, Cosmetics, and Vernacular Ethnology in Weimar and Nazi Germany; Uta G. Poiger
PART III: APPROPRIATIONS AND AGENCY IN AFRICA AND ASIA
11. Contesting Beauty Concepts in Precolonial and Colonial Kenya: Hierarchy, Resistance, and Identity; Christiane Reichart-Burikukiye
12. Imported Surgeries? Accounting for the Rise of Tehran's Nose-Job Industry; Sara Lenehan
13. Embodying Modernity: The Thrills and Ills of Being a Beautiful Woman in Tana Karo, North Sumatra; Karin Klenke