All the Rage by Virginia Nicholson

All the Rage: 

Stories from the Frontline of Beauty: A History of Pain, Pleasure, and Power

by Virginia Nicholson

Pegasus Books 2024

Virginia Nicholson’s captivating new book, All the Rage: Stories from the Frontline of Beauty: A History of Pain, Pleasure, and Power begins at what might at first seem an odd place: the 1860 dressing room of Princess Alexandra of Denmark, who’d recently been shipped across the sea to marry England’s Prince Edward and was already being celebrated in prose and verse as a foreign beauty whose hairstyle and wardrobe would prompt a wave of new fashions in London that season. 

In the tone of knowing playfulness that will go on to permeate the book, Nicholson is a bit skeptical of the princess. “To modern eyes … her features may seem more handsome than attractive; her jawline looks rather heavy,” she writes, adding, in an effort to forestall a visit from the angry husband, “But her complexion is smooth, flawless and completely free from make-up.” 

Since any generation is nowhere more vulnerable to all other generations than on grounds of fashion, this is exactly the right tone of po-faced charity to adopt, and Nicholson maintains it flawlessly throughout All the Rage. The book is 500 pages long, covering trends in both fashion and corresponding social movements that have each commanded many 500-page books on their own, so a certain breezy dispatch is necessary to keep the show moving along here. 

Although beauty, pain, pleasure, and even power can be experienced across the board, this is a book about women. When Nicholson notes that “even today society tends to close ranks around the cliche that a woman must be younger, shorter, poorer and weaker than her man,” she’s not only displaying the pathological distrust of the Oxford comma that stalks this whole book but also clarifying her focus: the changing presentation of the feminine through fashion.

This presentation is made through major culture phenomena like Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 bestseller Gone with the Wind, in which “Scarlett O’Hara is little, frilly, passionate and childishly impulsive – in other words, feminine” … whereas Rhett Butler is “rich, a rough diamond, dominating and grown-up – in other words, manly.” But many of her other quick case studies are now as dated as the fashions they exhibited. For instance, Nicholson discusses Lady Diana Manners, youngest child of the Duchess of Rutland, cavorting as the goddess Diana on the cover of a June 1910 issue of The Tatler (“The Greek goddess with her bow and quiver certainly owed much of her lissom beauty to a combination of shapely underwear, face powder and clever hairdressing,” Nicholson writes, slightly off since Diana was the Roman version of Artemis and still resolutely refusing that correct final comma. “Emancipation was skin deep”). We touch on Charles Dana Gibson’s famous “Gibson Girl” from turn-of-the-20th-century Collier’s, an artistic creation Nicholson rightly claims “captured the age.” 

And through it all, one of Nicholson’s core resentments, that for women in all ages and all societal castes “beauty is duty,” an obligation imposed by one half of society on the other half. Nicholson is everywhere intensely readable on the subject of what “all the rage” actually cost the women who had to obey its dictates. “Think of all that wasted potential, given over to dressing prettifying, embellishing, whitening, curling and tight-lacing – because male patronage demanded it, and because a woman was nothing without that patronage,” Nicholson writes. “And then think how that time might have been spent – ‘toward achieving respectable results in art, or science, or literature.’” 

All the Rage is full of pictures, but it’s Nicholson’s prose that illuminates it throughout. The subject of the social forces behind fashion has of course had a small library of books written about it, but this is the liveliest and shrewdest example to appear in the popular market so far this year. 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News