“‘Le miracle et le mirage’: Beauty institutes and the making of modern french women”

Abstract

This article examines how, as a centerpiece of France’s commercial beauty culture, the early twentieth-century beauty institute provided the strategies, goods, and professional opportunities required to make French women modern. An industry dedicated to women’s self-care and instrumental in making women visible (creating a look that in turn influenced how women would be seen) in the industrial metropolis, beauty institutes, I argue, provided a uniquely feminine path to modernity. Investigating institutes as both a commercial venture and a cultural enterprise, this article culls the autobiographies and personal letters of female entrepreneurs, the news items and advertisements posted in women’s lifestyle magazines, debates in trade journals, and a variety of beauty, health and hygiene manuals, to uncover women’s extensive involvement in and complex relationship to France’s modern beauty industry. Through these sources, the article considers less how business profited from women’s beauty work to illuminate how beauty work influenced pervasive cultural ideals regarding modern womanhood, thereby enabling French women to produce new social identities in the decades following the Great War.