1. Pictures of the New York City subway from 1946. What surprised me most here is how many women are standing up while men are sitting. I think in every picture where there are people standing and people sitting, there are more women than men standing and more men than women sitting. This surprises me, because everything I've ever heard from my elders suggests that back in the "good old days" when everyone wore suits and hats, gentlemen would always always always give up their seats for a lady.
2. Pictures of middle-aged women from the 1960s. What surprised me here is how frumpy the people look (my own mother is in her 60s, and looks younger than everyone in these pictures), but how nice their clothes are. There's probably half a dozen outfits in there that I'd actually wear myself and feel well-dressed doing so, and if you told me that the pink shoes on the lady in the third picture were next season's Fluevogs I'd totally believe you. And yet, overall, they still look frumpy to me.
I'm wondering if the overall aesthetic has changed, either culturally or because of improved technology. I think the aesthetic in which these ladies were dressing themselves focuses on going through all the right steps. These ladies have their hair set, they have nice dresses and nice shoes and stockings and pearls, they have their red lipstick. Check, check, check, everything on the checklist.
In comparison, I think today's aesthetic focuses more on creating an appearance of naturally-occurring flawlessness but doesn't care as much about which checklist items you'd use. It doesn't matter whether your hair is set nicely or artfully tousled, as long as it looks healthy and plentiful and probably not grey. It doesn't matter if you have red lipstick or look like you've done anything with your lips at all, but you'd better get your lines and blemishes and dark circles convincingly covered. It doesn't matter how nice your clothes are or aren't, but you'd better give an overall impression clothed that you're not unpleasant to look at naked.
My grandmother things what she needs to do to make her feet sandal-ready is paint her toenails. I think what I need to do to make my feet sandal-ready is pumice and moisturize until there is no visible sign of coarse skin anywhere other than the soles (I'd remove it from the soles too, but it turns out the purpose of those calluses is they make it not hurt to walk), pull every hair out with tweezers, apply a light layer of self-tanner to hide any evidence that I ever had a sock tan, and paint my toenails. (And all the aesthetic shortcomings of my feet were inherited from my grandmother.) Could our respective pedicure standards be indicative of a broader cultural shift?
10 comments:
You're definitely on to something here. One additional thing I note from the pictures of the women, though; the vast majority of them are wearing similar shades (bright red/dark pink) of lipstick. I think that today, we actually have less of this kind of conformity with respect to make-up (red is the colour of lipstick! wear it!) and more focus on people figuring out what is most flattering for their particular colouring, face shape, etc. Which is some ways adds way more stress/need for expertise and care, but probably results in more attractive make-upping?
I don't really know, I'm not big on grooming; I don't wear make-up, and I get my feet sandal-ready the same way you grandmother does (and even that's only because of an old injury to one of my toe nails that's discoloured it and made it unfit for human eyes) :)
Re #1, the more I learn, the more I think every "good old days" generalization is a myth based on dislike of or discomfort with the present.
Re #2, based on my mother's beauty/grooming dynamic vs. mine, I think an older generation was more concerned with conformity (as abluecanary says) and fashion correctness vs anything goes if it works for you.
My mother always notes if hair colour "looks natural". I always tell her no one cares about that anymore. I mean, individual people do, but it's not a necessary requirement. People dye their hair distinctly not-natural colours if they want. It's an individual decision.
My feet are sandal-ready when it's hot enough for sandals. I might get a pedicure in June, and that is good through September. More than that is too high-maintenance for me.
It could be that there is no "typical" anymore, that we are content to let each person find her own place on the beauty/maintenance vs comfort spectrum than our parents and grandparents were.
"It doesn't matter whether your hair is set nicely or artfully tousled, as long as it looks healthy and plentiful and probably not grey. It doesn't matter if you have red lipstick or look like you've done anything with your lips at all, but you'd better get your lines and blemishes and dark circles convincingly covered."
To me this is something the women's magazines put forward, but not something actual people do very much of. Most people I know are aging more naturally.
What I intended to say was that today we prioritize hiding greys/lines/blemishes insofar as we are putting effort into modifying our appearance. In other words, that's the general direction in which our efforts, whatever they may be, are focused.
I think I lost something in the editing process. I was adding and deleting stuff more than usual because I'm trying very hard (and not succeeding as well as I'd like) not to be overly critical or nitpicky about the 1960s ladies' appearance, because when they consented to have their photos taken 50 years ago they weren't consenting to having their appearance judged on the internet by the standards of a world with digital cameras and photoshop and airbrush makeup. But, at the same time, the idea I'm trying to describe here was inspired by the fact that I find their appearance frumpy despite the fact that they have clearly taken such care, and certain elements of their appearance are relevant to making my point.
One of the examples I edited out is that some of those ladies have carefully-applied red lipstick, but don't appear to have done anything to hide the circles under their eyes. That wouldn't happen today. I think everyone today who is young enough not to have been influenced by the same aesthetic that the ladies in the pictures are dressing to would, if they're about to be photographed, first try to make their skin look as flawless as possible before thinking of lipstick.
Ah yes, I agree with you now.
You've reminded me how my grandmother disapproved of my going around without lipstick. She thought it was slovenly and unfeminine.
One thing I'm wondering is, within this conformist 1960s aesthetic, if you take a more attractive person who's just rolled out of bed, and a less attractive person done up "properly", which one looks more attractive to people living within the set-hair-and-red-lipstick aesthetic?
In other words, would the presence or absence of lipstick blind your grandmother to the degree of natural attractiveness?
"In other words, would the presence or absence of lipstick blind your grandmother to the degree of natural attractiveness?"
In her case, absolutely yes. She didn't care about natural attractiveness - that's just good fortune, no credit goes to the woman herself. Full gear was what counted, the steps the woman took to look as she should.
My mom has a similar ethic, somewhat diluted. My mom would say, "She's a beautiful girl under all that mess" or "She has such lovely hair, if she would just take care of it".
I have no idea if either of them are typical of their generation. But I suspect my mother's peers would have a similar reaction.
Ironically, if I had made my beauty decisions the same way when I was a teen, it would have been called succumbing to peer pressure and been considered A Bad Thing.
Yeah, the evils of peer pressure were applied very selectively in my experience, and that of my older siblings.
If anyone got too non-conformist, we were reined in. Haircuts, clothes, makeup - everything had to fit in with the going rate.
When I started junior high, my father was still making me wear a skirt or dress to school every day. I was the only girl in my class not wearing jeans to school. And *that* was the argument that caused him to relent - that I was the only one.
Needless to say, in many other cases "everyone else is doing it" would not have been considered a valid argument!
Heh. For reasons I still don't understand, my father would always try to convince me not to wear a skirt. I still remember one Thanksgiving, some of the cousins went outside to play basketball, and I stayed inside because I didn't want to play basketball. And out of nowhere, my father started lecturing me on how if I hadn't decided to wear a skirt that day I could be playing basketball. But I didn't even want to be playing basketball.
Grownups also used to "joke" that they should just make jeans the school uniform since teenagers wore jeans all the time anyway. So for the vast majority of high school, I didn't wear jeans, at all, ever.
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