Deslandes, Paul R. - The Culture of Male Beauty in Britain: From the First Photographs to David Beckham

Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2021. Hardcover. Black and bw photo-illustrated DJ with white lettering; grey boards with red lettering; xiv, 414 pp.; 16 unnumbered pages of plates; richly illustrated. In this book, the author offers an account of how notions of male beauty changed in Britain over the past few centuries. With both fluid prose and 120 carefully selected images, the author traces the sustained, and culturally significant, masculine engagement with beauty culture in Britain from the nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century, including considerations of advertising, health, pornography, psychology, sport, and celebrity culture. The author's account chronicles the ebb and flow of certain beauty standards in British male culture, illustrating the slow rise of the cult of youth, the growth of muscularity as both a masculine attribute and a marker of attractiveness, and the falling in and out of fashion of hirsuteness and hairlessness. Along the way, he links discussions of youth, fitness, and beauty to growing concerns about race and empire and fears about degeneracy. With respect to the postwar world, he also highlights the ways expressing what one found attractive became central to the development of modern sexual subjectivities, especially as distinctive gay and heterosexual identities coalesced in British culture. This book shows not only how notions of beauty changed, but also how the British came to understand themselves as a visual people and as sophisticated consumers of theatrical and cinematographic images, photographs, and advertisements. -- WorldCat. VG (Very light edgewear to DJ) .

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