Askmen.com Presents the Style Bible: The 11 Rules for Building a Complete and Timeless Wardrobe

Milady (Author)

Bundle: Milady Standard Cosmetology, 13th + Milady Standard Haircutting System, Spiral Bound Version + Study Guide: The Essential Companion for Milady

Margarette Lincoln (Author)

Perfection: 400 Years of Women's Quest for Beauty

4, A colourful account of women's health, beauty, and cosmetic aids, from stays and corsets to today's viral trends Victorian women ate arsenic to achieve an ideal, pale complexion, while in the 1790s balloon corsets were all the rage, designed to make the wearer appear pregnant. Women of the eighteenth century applied blood from a black cat's tail to problem skin, while doctors in the 1880s promoted woollen underwear to keep colds at bay. Beautification and the pursuit of health may seem all-consuming today, but their history is long and fantastically varied. Ranging across the last four hundred years, Margarette Lincoln examines women's health and beauty in fascinating detail. Through first-hand accounts and reports of physicians, quacks, and advertising, Lincoln captures women's lived experience of consuming beauty products, and the excitement--and trauma--of adopting the latest fashion trends. Considering everything from body sculpture, diet, and exercise to skin, teeth, and hair, Perfection is a vibrant account of women's body-fashioning--and shows how intimately these practices are related to community and identity throughout history.

Djurdja Bartlett

Fashioneast: The Spectre That Haunted Socialism

A richly illustrated, comprehensive study of fashion under socialism, from state-sponsored prototypes to unofficial imitations of Paris fashion.The idea of fashion under socialism conjures up images of babushka headscarves and black market blue jeans. And yet, as Djurdja Bartlett shows in this groundbreaking book, the socialist East had an intimate relationship with fashion. Official antagonism--which cast fashion as frivolous and anti-revolutionary--eventually gave way to grudging acceptance and creeping consumerism. Bartlett outlines three phases in socialist fashion, and illustrates them with abundant images from magazines of the period: postrevolutionary utopian dress, official state-sanctioned socialist fashion, and samizdat-style everyday fashion. Utopian dress, ranging from the geometric abstraction of the constructivists under Bolshevism in the Soviet Union to the no-frills desexualized uniform of a factory worker in Czechoslovakia, reflected the revolutionary urge for a clean break with the past. The highly centralized socialist fashion system, part of Stalinist industrialization, offered official prototypes of high fashion that were never available in stores--mythical ...