All the Rage: A Conversation with Virginia Nicholson
A Social History of Beauty, 1860-1960
…Is our style our own, or has it been historically determined by external, often political forces? Who decides on the kind of face we show to the world, and whose approval are we seeking when we get ready to confront it each day? What are the roles played by custom, colour and class?
These are the questions that social historian Virginia Nicholson seeks to answer in her new book, All the Rage. Stories from the Frontline of Beauty: A History of Pain, Pleasure, and Power 1860-1960. In a sprawling tome, Nicholson covers a century of advances—and stumbles backwards—in female beauty; the changes that brought us from crinolines, corsets, and fully-covered bodies to the bikini and bare skin. Interwoven with the history of feminism, All the Rage is “…an attempt to understand and to reconcile the history of the liberation of the female body in light of an incongruity: that, at the very time that women’s economic, educational, sexual and political chains were being unlocked, the shackles of perceived ‘femininity’ were tightening their grip.”
As the granddaughter of artist Vanessa Bell and great-niece of Virginia Woolf, Nicholson was raised immersed in beauty and a lineage of strong women. Motivated by learning about their lives—after a career in television documentaries and motherhood—she began researching and writing social histories of women. Her earlier books center on specific periods—WWII, the 50s—whereas All the Rage takes on a much vaster expanse of time, expertly entwining mostly primary sources from women of all economic backgrounds and lifestyles. Cosmetics, plastic surgery, fashion, corseting, exercise, technology, photography and cinema are just some of the subjects Nicholson alights on, producing an eminently readable journey through the many demands and pressures made on women in the name of beauty.
Told chronologically, each chapter begins with a photograph of a noted beauty of the period—from Princess Alexandra of Denmark, to Lillie Langtry, to Freda Dudley Ward, finally to Brigitte Bardot—with a dissection of every element of her clothing (down to the underclothes), makeup, hair, and pose.
I spoke with Virginia last week about the research and writing process for All the Rage, favourite primary source archives and surprising discoveries, and much more about this book. All the Rage is now available wherever books are sold.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Laura McLaws Helms: Thank you for meeting with me today. I'd love to start by hearing about your background as a social historian and what drew you to social history in particular.
Virginia Nicholson: Actually, I've had two careers. I started out in my younger career making TV documentaries, and when I had a family that wasn't quite so feasible, particularly as I was traveling all the time. I was traveling in Europe, I speak two other European languages, so it just didn't make sense and it wasn't tenable. I put all that on hold, and after a little time went by, I started writing little bits and pieces.
The first book I wrote, actually, was a book about my grandmother's home [Charleston: An Artist’s Home]—my grandmother being the artist Vanessa Bell, sister of Virginia Woolf. I did a book about that, which in a way was a fairly straightforward book to work on. It was about stuff I already knew that I was steeped in. I was invited to do it by the publisher, and it was a fairly standard piece of writing, but it got me hooked.
It was writing that book that made me ask all sorts of questions about that generation of people, particularly of women, particularly of my grandmother. I started asking myself questions, so how did she make her life work? How did it actually function? How did her whole apparatus of being an artist and being a mother and being a wife and being a lover and running a home, how did all that function?
My first book [after that] was Among the Bohemians. It was a book about how artists made their lives work, and about, really, the bottom line of how they lived their day-to-day lives. Because of my background as a TV researcher, I found myself working in a very similar way, which was to go out and find people and ask them questions, and to say to myself, "Well, I don't necessarily know the answer to this, but I know how to find out and I know who to ask." I don't just go to libraries and archives; I go to people who have lived experience. That was how I began my earlier books.
I guess one thing led to another, I started asking all sorts of other questions, but I think I've always had at the base of my authorial method, my writer's method—I'm not a scholarly historian. I'm always reaching out to what I hope is a popular audience, in the best sense of the word, because I've been used to talking to TV audiences in my earlier career. Also, to make it readable, to make it fun, and to ask the kind of questions that the everyday reader wants to ask. I guess I write the kind of books I want to read at the end of the day, and that involves reading a lot of books that a lot of people don't want to read so that you don't have to.
This is now my seventh book. I hope there'll be more. They've always had that interest in, I'm going to use the word trivia, but trivia is a loaded word. I don't think trivia really is trivial. I think trivia is important. I think the tiny choices we make about what we put on when we get up in the morning, what clothes we wear, how we present ourselves to the world are really important and very revelatory. This book in particular is about that choice. We make it, every single person makes that choice every day of their lives, almost: how are we going to present our faces to the world? What are we going to do? How are we going to look? What story are we going to tell the world?
Laura: What was the impetus to research and write this book on beauty and women?
Virginia: Again, it comes from quite deep in my background, because I'm the daughter of an artist, I'm the granddaughter of an artist. The home where my grandmother lived, Charleston here in sunny Sussex—today it's a museum, which I'm very much involved with. I was steeped in the visual world. I was extremely influenced by color, by pattern, by design, by just the visual projections of the world.
I loved fairy tales, I loved dolls, I loved dressmaking. My mother was a wonderful dressmaker and taught me how to do dressmaking. When I was in my teens, my sister and I used to sneak into the changing rooms of very top-end designers that we couldn't afford, try on the clothes, and do little pictures in the mirrors of what we looked like, and then we'd go home and copy them. My sister's a better dressmaker than I am, but she's a designer still today. There was all that.
Then my father, oddly enough, was also profoundly interested in fashion and wrote a book about fashion, more on a theoretical basis, but he taught me a lot about fashion. I remember him talking me through the march through of different body shapes in the 18th and 19th centuries, how the women's body shapes morphed in and out and changed from bottom-heavy to top-heavy, from bust-heavy to bum-heavy, to thin waists and fat busts, and all those different extraordinary morphing shapes that you watch if you follow 19th-century fashion. He was fascinated by that and wrote a theoretical book about fashion called On Human Finery.
I got fascinated. I was infected by his love of fashion, partly because as well he was a visual artist, so he used his interest to create fashions on models, statuettes, all kinds of renditions of how women looked. He loved to paint women.
Laura: How did you approach researching this book? I know you mentioned that this was researched and written over COVID, right?
Virginia: Yes. Well, I did the deal in early February 2020. I was going to set about it in the normal way I do, which is to go up and down to London a lot, spend a lot of time in archives and libraries. That suddenly became completely impossible. Actually, it was a very good moment for me because I discovered just how much time I'd been wasting doing that. So much is now digitized.
I did quite a big persuasion number on a couple of archives that I'd worked with a lot and said to the people who run them who I knew, "Hey, it's really difficult for me to work without access to this stuff. I know you've got your stuff digitized. Can you let me have access?" They would go, "Oh, all right. Well, here's a passcode, don't tell anybody." I had a lot of access.
Nothing really replaces the wonderfulness of dealing with real stuff on real paper. Nevertheless, second best, it's great. It did mean that I did a lot of exploration. For example, I found that you could get a phenomenal amount of American newsprint through the Library of Congress website for free. There's also an astonishing amount of old books done through Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive. Some of it legal, some of it I suspect not. Nevertheless, I just kept pressing buttons and finding out all sorts of stuff.
I'm a member of a private subscription library in London, a very ancient one—it's been going for about 250 years—called The London Library. They give me access to JSTOR, to the British Newspaper Archive, to the Dictionary of National Biography, to endless newspapers, to all kinds of wonderful resources. Yes, I sat here, and of course, technology now means that I can work with a very smart database. I have the author Amanda Foreman to thank for that. Amanda put me onto this incredible research database which cross-references [filePro]. I built up, I suppose, in the end, about 3,000 entries on my database.
Laura: Yes, I figured, because this book covers a hundred years, that there must have been so many sources. Did you do any interviews for this?
Virginia: I thought about it—it got very difficult because of COVID. I did go and talk to one very ancient elderly lady, and she wasn't really with it and it wasn't very helpful. I then began to realize that if I did interviews that only affected the final 30 years of the book, because everyone else would be dead, it was going to sound very unbalanced. I stuck to primary or secondary sources, whatever I could.
I do have a very strong preference for diaries, if I can get hold of them; unpublished material, if I can get hold of it. We have a wonderful archive here in Sussex called the Mass Observation Archive. Mass Observation was this fantastic, it was called an anthropology of everyday life. It was set up in the 1930s. I used to go around that all the time because it's about five miles from where I live. These were one of the kind archivists who let me get access online to their digitized sources.
They used to send out directives and say, "We're going to do a directive about personal appearance." This was fantastic for me, because there's all these perfectly ordinary everyday people writing about how they feel in 1937 about wearing makeup, which is quite an interesting turning point because makeup is acceptable in some areas, but not in others. It's acceptable for some people, not for others. Some people really felt very stressed and pressured by the growing emphasis on makeup. Some people just absolutely loved it. Some people found it too expensive, et cetera. That was really, really interesting. Yes, so I loved finding all that unpublished stuff.
There's another marvelous archive at the University of Uxbridge, just near Heathrow Airport. It's an archive of so-called working-class autobiographies. There were all these unpublished memoirs by individuals that have been collected over years by a very clever old social anthropologist called John Burnett, and he deposited them at Uxbridge.
Laura: I really loved those. There were all these quotes from these women in the book, and I would go and check the back to see where they were from and find out that they were the Mass Observation Project—these various different unpublished diaries that, really, their voice came through so clearly, these women.
Virginia: Thanks, I appreciate that. That's what I like.
Laura: I ended up ordering, I think, two of the books based on the Mass Observation Project that you mentioned, so I look forward to getting them and reading them because they seem fascinating.
I looked at your previous books online and they were mostly decade-based, like the Interwar period [Singled Out], World War II [Millions Like Us], the 1950s [Perfect Wives in Ideal Homes], 1960s [How Was It For You?], whereas this is a century. First of all, why did you choose to do 1860 to 1960? Also, how was it different approaching a century versus a decade?
Virginia: Big answer to that question. I got as far as 1960 and everyone kept saying to me, "You're going to do the 1970s?" No, I was too much like a teenager/grown-up in the 1970s already. I was born in the 50s. It didn't feel, too, like history anymore. It felt a bit uncomfortable. It was just somehow the subject didn't feel historical enough. There was that.
Then when I came up with the idea, I had to find a way of bracketing it. Actually, that came quite quickly, because the beginning in 1860, there's two reasons. One is that is the high point of Victorian insane, exaggerated fashion. It's the crinoline, it's the ultimate corset. It's also the point where you can see less of the female body than you almost ever have before or since, except for in the evenings when they went a bit décolleté.
Apart from that, they were covered from the neck down to the fingers and you couldn't see their feet or their legs at all. They might as well not have had legs. I invented this concept that made me laugh, which was “the no-legs woman.” That was a good beginning, but it was another reason, which was the technology. The central point of the 19th century was more or less when photography went mainstream. It was still for, probably, more privileged people.
It wasn't like the daguerreotypes anymore. It was proper photographic prints that you could take in black and white if you stood very still for quite a long time, and you could reach point 1860, 1870, where a lot of middle-class people could have photographs done of themselves and their families and spread them around, just really in a way that we spread around our Instagrams.
They have the carte de visite, which I would say are really comparable to what we do with Instagram. Not the same way, but it's like, "Hi, do you want to see a picture of me? I'm going to put it through your letterbox." It may not be in your inbox, but it's on your doormat. This was the carte de visite system, and it's a selfie, as it were, and your neighbor or your person five streets away will get that and they know you've been to call. What's so different? I found that fascinating. It was just the kickoff of something that we've now become very familiar with.
Then where to end it? The 1960s, we end with the bikini, and you can't get much less than the bikini without being naked. I don't want to go to total nakedness in any way. No one's walking around naked much in the Western world, as far as I know, except on certain beaches and private estates. Basically, the least we get away with is a fairly brief bikini, perhaps Brigitte Bardot's bikini, though thought to be brief could have been briefer. To all intents and purposes, it covered the essentials. It covered nipples and the genital area.
Then on the technological front, as I say, really, by 1960, we had moving color pictures. We had pictures that could talk. We had what we have now. We didn't have the internet, but the internet, it communicates differently… You and I are talking to each other across a continent, and that couldn't happen. Nevertheless, you're still a moving color picture and I'm a moving color picture. Those things haven't changed. I think that's a tipping point that I wanted to stop at. The 1860 to 1960 thing, to me, works quite comfortably.
Laura: I agree. It completes itself rather well.
Virginia: It wraps it around.
Laura: Most of the technological and fashion change happened in that century.
Virginia: Same way, for example, that century, that period of a hundred years saw an astonishing amount of change in terms of both female beauty progress or otherwise. We now have full-on cosmetic surgery, and all sorts of techniques have been evolved, but most of the techniques were already there. Silicon implants perhaps were yet to come, but they were on their way. Certainly, cosmetic actual surgery, facelifts and what have you, were there, and drainage and all that kind of thing, reductions and enhancements were already there.
I suppose, that century has another beginning and end point, which is that the 1860s, 1870s—I think you could look at that period and say, that's when you can really see feminism and the feminist movement starting to very slowly grind into action. If you go back to the 18th century in the UK, you've got Mary Wollstonecraft and women of that ilk. They were one-offs, they were pinpricks.
By the 1860s, we have people gathering together in groups and saying, "What are we going to do about the vote? We need to make this happen." It took a painfully long time to get that to happen, but it happened. By the end of the 1960s, you do have, again, another very interesting tipping point, which is that there are more women working outside the home than in it. That's gone on.
Again, it's got this wraparound of emancipation. Of course, that's the key point of what I'm trying to, the message of the book, which is, where political and social emancipation are concerned, we've made leaps and bounds, [but] where that impacts on our appearance, the story is not so straightforward. The story actually goes backwards in a lot of ways. The more we open ourselves up to new freedoms on the political arena, the more we open ourselves up to throwing off our corsets and throwing off our tight, constricting clothes, the more anxieties we introduce about our bodily appearance. That is, I think, a terrible step backwards.
Really, it's meant that instead of creating our appearance from the outside in via the corset, we're having to hack bits off ourselves. We're actually cutting ourselves up in order to conform to how we think the female body should appear, as opposed to pushing it in with metal straps and laces and trusses and belts and what have you.
Laura: Now it's all dieting and exercising into the shape, the form—it's all having to come from the internal versus the external.
Virginia: People get very angry at the thought of the corset, and I do too because it looks so unbelievably uncomfortable and horrible, but at least when you took your corset off, the body had some integrity beneath it. You hadn't cut it up. You need to remember that when a woman put on a corset, it wasn't made to fit her, it was made to fit her shape. You could be quite fat and wear a corset. What it did was it pushed one bit up and the other bit down and then pulled in the middle. All it did was reorganize the fat. It didn't cut the fat off, it just pushed it around a good deal.
Laura: Yes, and then you had the sleeves and big skirts hiding everything else.
Virginia: As for the legs, nobody ever knew what those women's legs were like, probably not even their husbands, in quite a number of cases, when their husbands were all off to the Alhambra to see the ballerinas and see what their legs look like.
Laura: Did researching and writing this book change your own personal habits or views about beauty within your own life?
Virginia: I don't think very much, no. Partly because I'm quite old, and also I'm quite set in my ways. What I really didn't want to do was to make people feel bad about wanting to look good. I've always loved looking good. I'm not looking great at the moment. I really can't wait to have my hair cut tomorrow and I'm going to have it colored too. I just can't wait because that's something I've enjoyed doing for the last 30, 40 years, is just improving on nature. I don't see any harm in that.
I want people to come away having read this book having not felt criticized. If anything, they should feel, if things aren't how they should be, it's not women's fault. We are stuck in a bind. We're hardwired into a certain mindset, which is not of our making. Meanwhile, there are good things and bad things about it. I love color, I love pretty jewelry, I love having my nails done, I love putting on make-up.
I've got a little quote quite near the beginning of the book, which I've always held to, which was a very old friend of mine, whenever anything went wrong in life, she would say, "I know it's awful, your boyfriend's left you, you've got a terrible overdraft, you're liable to lose your job, never mind, have a bath and put on makeup." It was really good advice, I still do it, have a bath and put on makeup when I'm not feeling great, and you just feel better. You feel better about yourself. It works.
I think that can be taken way too far and I think it can become unbelievably prescriptive, and laughably prescriptive at times, and I hope a lot of people will find it quite amusing at times reading the book. The way some of this so-called helpful sisterly advice really is incredibly undermining and time-consuming and ridiculous, whenever you think about it, keep twisting your ankles in circles, or always keep your belt up tight, or never wear hoop earrings, all this ludicrous nonsense. Let's have fun with it as well. Let's not be too critical.
Laura: Was there anything really surprising that you came across while you were researching or did most things fit in with what you already thought?
Virginia: I think the most surprising thing I discovered was when I found the story of Suzanne Noël.
Suzanne Noël, who was one of the very early cosmetic surgeons, and she was French. The extraordinary thing about her story was that I think normally you wouldn't equate having cosmetic surgery with having a feminist mindset, a feminist worldview. She took the opposite view. She got herself trained—which was unusual enough in the first place—getting herself trained up and finding new ways of doing facelifts and new ways of changing how you could have fewer wrinkles around the eyes and all the rest of it.
I have never had a facelift, I don't think I ever will. No, it's not what the people I hang out with tend to do. We're a bit snobbish about it. However, Suzanne Noël thought that was a great idea, but that was because she lived in a different world.
In the society in which she lived, there was a hideous prejudice against the older woman, and so older women could be, through no fault of their own, sacked from their job, find themselves penniless, their husband might have left them or abandoned them, they were forced into having to earn a living, which most middle-class women didn't have to do. Suddenly they're hitting 40 or 50, and lo and behold, they are being subjected to age-related discrimination, and they're out of a job and there is no safety net in France, there was no safety net here either. They are in despair, and Suzanne Noël takes them under her wing and says, "Okay, I'm going to do a little operation on you. It'll only take you a very short while. You'll find yourself back at work in no time," and it worked. That is turning everything on its head in terms of feminism.
I was very surprised, but I wanted to applaud her. It made me think very differently, and that's always great when people make you think differently. It's refreshing. Yes, alongside that, there were some horror stories like for old Gladys Deacon. Who thought it was a good idea to put paraffin into the bridge of your nose and hope that it would stay there?
Then the other young French woman, Suzanne Geoffre, who went to the wrong surgeon, and whose surgeon very stupidly agreed to cut open her legs because she said, "I will kill myself if I don't have smaller calves. My fiancé won't marry me if I don't have smaller calves." He slits them down the back, removes insufficient muscle, pulls it all too tight, trusses it up, and of course, in a very short time, she develops gangrene and has to have an amputation. You think, "Whose bright idea was this? Why were people not asking questions?"
Anyway, he got sued, but in order for her to sue him, her lawyer had to prove that she was a dimwitted female who was far too prone to female vanity, and therefore, it wasn't her fault because that's just what women are like. There were so many stories of that kind, these wretched women who put untried and untested mascara on their eyes and went blind or the radium-impregnated corset. Again, not a great idea.
Laura: There were quite a few of those stories in the book where I was just shuddering, these women being guinea pigs.
Virginia: "Oh, let's try this one. Yes, she's keen to have a facelift, but Matt, why don't I sell her a leg-lengthening thing while I'm at it?" I hope I get the last laugh in the afterward when we manage to get in a little bit about penis lengthening and penis increase. Also, men who want their legs lengthened. I don't know if you've read about that. I think I found a piece somewhere, about men who go in for leg lengthening, and it’s apparently agony. I think, “Welcome to my world.”
Laura: Yes, I can't imagine putting myself through that thing.
Virginia: No, I hope you don't do. I certainly won't. [laughs] Meanwhile, have a bath and put on makeup by all means.
Laura: Yes, it's funny because the other day I was having a hard day, just hormonally, postpartum, and that was exactly my husband's advice to me, and it did work—just to go hide in the bath and then get dressed and do my face and make myself feel a little more pulled together. It’s funny how much it does work.
Virginia: A world of good. I've also tried, at the end, on that note, to celebrate some of the women who I think are beautiful and have great taste, both of my own generation and of my daughter's generation. I have two grown-up daughters, and my younger daughter in particular, Maria, is my go-to. If I'm worried about what to wear, I say, "Do you think I should wear this one?" She said, "Yes, that's great." The amount of selfies I've sent her from changing rooms.
Laura: In this book, you go back and forth between the UK and America. Was that due to your research, because it was online, or did you find that during this period, our beauty ideals and beauty world were so inextricably linked that you couldn't just focus on one country?
Virginia: I think more the latter than the former. We always have said for years in this country, where America leads, we follow usually about 10 years behind. Actually, that's probably got a little bit closer with the advent of more social media, et cetera. I think the so-called special relationship has worked on so many fronts, and one of them has been fashion.
I was really interested when I started looking, for example, at the story of Lucy Duff-Gordon, who started the design house Lucile. She started it here in the UK, but she went over to America regularly and found herself talking to Elsie de Wolfe, who was the great interior designer and who said, "Hey, why don't you…" There's this beautiful little scene of them sitting in a very grand restaurant in Manhattan and discussing all the women around them, and Lucile is saying, "You Americans, you just don't dress well, you don't know how to put yourself together at all." Elsie says to her, "Well, you know how to, so why don't you start a shop here? There's nothing the Americans would like better than to have an English woman tell them how to dress, and maybe with a bit of Paris thrown in."
So that's what she did, which is kind of nice and back to front because it's putting Europe before America for once. Of course, that doesn't last long because in no time at all, we are starting with the story of Hollywood, and once Hollywood gets underway, and of course, the silent movies were getting underway from pre-first World War I, that changes the story completely and, again, we're back to that advance of visual technology. That's not just about photography and it's not just about movies, it's about electric light, it's about projection technology.
It's just incredible to think that even though we had photographs, we couldn't blow them up very big, but from the time that we had movies, and silent movies, you could see a woman's face projected against a wall 5-foot or 6-foot high. Now, that just entirely changes how a woman sees herself. She can see every spot, every pore, every pimple, every imperfection in her features, her teeth, her eyelashes, you name it, so she has to look pretty damn perfect. That is really changing the story for women. They have to really get their act together. It's not surprising that that's when makeup starts to really get underway.
That's the story of Hollywood, of course, and that's something I continued to really follow through, I think right from the early days of Gladys Cooper and Clara Bow right through to Marilyn Monroe and Doris Day and so on. Yes, America was very much in the forefront visually and in advertisements and in movies and in all manner of cultural media. Oh my gosh, I sometimes wonder how I wrote this book. There's such a lot of stuff to cover. Two world wars, a revolution of feminism, a lot of very big deal stuff to cover, but that was the challenge and that was the fun.
Laura: You manage to weave it all together very well, all of these different sources and people from different economic backgrounds—whether it's a lady and then next it's just a working-class woman from the Mass Observation project—weave it all together so you get a real sense of how all of these things were moving forward and changing and affecting women's lives.
Are you working on another book?
Virginia: I haven't started. I'm in what I would describe as a lull, but my lulls are never very quiet, so I'm waiting to sign on a new book, yes. I can't really reveal, but I think it'll cover a similar time frame and it'll be about women.
Laura: It seems like all of your books have women’s lives as the central focus.
Virginia: Yes, with the exception of that first one [Among the Bohemians]. Yes, I suppose, again, it's about writing the books I like to read. I like to read about women. I feel I understand them better than men. Maybe I'm just, in a way, questioning and trying to unpack—I guess every author does this in a way—one's own issues about one's own identity, one's own femininity.
I took quite a long time out from being a working person, between having my first child and going back to work as a writer. I left my TV job and I had seven years when I didn't work. I was the only one in my group who did. During that time, I brought up three children and I ran my house and I did all the things that my mother did. I cooked and did the laundry and school runs and all that kind of thing, but I did question it a lot, and at times it made me feel uncomfortable.
Perhaps those are things that, to an extent, I'm still trying to resolve and trying to persuade myself that I can feel good about. I do feel good about it because I think my children have grown up with… they're good kids, they're good grownups. You can never give yourself a total pat on the back, but given that the oldest is now 35, I give myself a pat on the back for that. But, yes, we all have unresolved issues.
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This was so great, thank you!!!