Questionable Standards: The Past and Present of Beauty
Royal Worcester Corset Company (American, 1864–1950). Corset , 1876. Cotton, metal, bone; Length at CF (a): 12 1/2 in. (31.8 cm). Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of the Brooklyn Museum, 2009; Gift of E. A. Meister, 1950 (2009.300.3105a–c)
«Why does beauty always seem unattainable? Throughout history, young women have taken drastic measures to be considered beautiful. While fashion has always been a means for individual expression and society has broadened its definition of beauty, we still see judgment against women who don't fit an ideal. Through investigation and interpretation of 19th-century fashion, we can see the ways women have tried to meet past beauty standards and how those standards have evolved over time.»
By looking at an American dress from the 1850s, shown below, we can see a contemporary beauty standard for women. Judging by the expensive material and embellishments, the dress would have been worn by an upper-class woman. (In fact, the dress was worn by the wife of Former Rhode Island Governor William Warner Hoppin.) The dress is broken up into two parts: bodice and skirt. Under the dress, a contemporary wearer would have worn a corset that laced up in the back and hooked in the front and a hoop skirt, which would give structure to the dress. She also would have added jewels, lace pieces, and other accessories to complete her outfit.
Dress , 1850s. American. Silk. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Mrs. Frederick Street Hoppin, 1963 (C.I.63.7.3a, b)
Hoop skirts helped women attain a fashionable dress shape without sacrificing comfort. They were collapsible, which made for easy closet storage and (albeit limited) sitting, most likely on the top or edge of a chair. The style of the corset remained relatively the same into the 1860s, but hoop-skirt technology changed with the approaching decade. The invention of the crinoline in 1856 allowed women to add volume to their skirts without the added weight of eight to ten starched petticoats.
Royal Worcester Corset Company (American, 1864–1950). Cage crinoline , 1862–63. American. Linen, metal; width: 25 in. (63.5 cm). Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of the Brooklyn Museum, 2009; Brooklyn Museum Collection (2009.300.2250)
With thin, steel loops sewn into a single petticoat, crinolines were much cheaper and lighter than previously used fabric and whale bone. As their mass production was perfected, the cost of a crinoline dropped from an estimated five dollars to two dollars and fifty cents, making it possible for both the lady of the house and her maids to stay fashionable.
By the mid-1860s, women were able to achieve a width of six feet in their skirt hems with the help of crinolines. The newfound ability to easily increase skirt size coincided with (and furthered) a changing fashion trend. It proved easier to add volume to the back of the skirt, as there was only so far to go in the front, and sometimes a separate but matching apron-shaped basque would be tied to the back as well.
Left: Franz Xaver Winterhalter's 1854 portrait of the Empress Eugénie shows the changing fashion trend toward a more elliptical, trailing silhouette. We created this GIF to give you a sense of the layers the empress might have been wearing beneath this dress. Image courtesy of the authors
Contemporary press made it seem like crinolines made simple movements like passing through a door, sitting on a couch, and getting in and out of a carriage very difficult, but these hardships were likely exaggerated in order to argue that women showed poor judgement. Amelia Bloomer, a women's rights advocate and proponent of dress reform, stopped wearing reform dress (a shorter skirt with loose trousers) after the hoop was introduced, in part because she found the hoop "light and pleasant to wear." While it is often difficult to separate the real and invented health risks of past fashion trends, it is true that women would do everything in their power to achieve a coveted figure despite the rumors of health risks and illnesses that resulted from altering one's body shape.
Today, the pressure to be a size zero, and then a zero-zero, is felt by teenagers and adults alike, but some modern designers reach outside of the limits of today's beauty standards to showcase a different take on beauty and fashion. Jean Paul Gaultier, an avant-garde fashion designer famous for constructing Madonna's cone bra, is a perfect example of how fashion is used in a more playful manner today. Gaultier believes that feminine beauty comes in many forms, which we can see in his use of curvy models and drag queens on the runway and the way he mocks absurd women's fashion trends in his designs.
Gaultier featured this haute couture dress in a show he called a compilation of his "greatest hits," which showcased clothes that resembled nudity. Jean Paul Gaultier (French, born 1952). Evening ensemble , spring/summer 2001. (A, b) silk, glass, synthetic; (c) silk, synthetic, leather; Length at CB (a): 56 in. (142.2 cm) Length (b, c): 21 in. (53.3 cm) Length (d, e): 9 1/2 in. (24.1 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, Catharine Breyer Van Bomel Foundation Gift, and funds from various donors, 2001 (2001.455.2a–i)
Modern women continue to take drastic measures to achieve a look that meets current beauty standards despite an expanding definition of beauty in the 21st century. Designers like Gaultier are helping to change these standards, but we still have a long way to go. After close examination of the evolution of women's fashion, we don't have a definitive answer to how beauty standards for women started or why they still exist today, but it has been interesting to explore.
Anna B. was formerly a high school intern with the Museum's High School Internship Program.
Julia G. was formerly a high school intern with the Museum's High School Internship Program.
Marcus J. was formerly a high school intern with the Museum's High School Internship Program.
Naja B.was formerly a high school intern with the Museum's High School Internship Program.
André Aciman: Why Beauty Is So Important to Us
By André Aciman Dec. 7, 2019
- Share full article
A quest for our better selves
Humans have engaged with the concept of beauty for millennia, trying to define it while being defined by it.
Plato thought that merely contemplating beauty caused “the soul to grow wings.” Ralph Waldo Emerson found beauty in Raphael’s “The Transfiguration,” writing that “a calm benignant beauty shines over all this picture, and goes directly to the heart.” In “My Skin,” Lizzo sings: “The most beautiful thing that you ever seen is even bigger than what we think it means.”
We asked a group of artists, scientists, writers and thinkers to answer this simple question: Why is beauty, however defined, so important in our lives? Here are their responses.
We’ll do anything to watch a sunset on a clear summer day at the beach. We’ll stand and stare and remain silent, as suffused shades of orange stretch over the horizon. Meanwhile, the sun, like a painter who keeps changing his mind about which colors to use, finally resolves everything with shades of pink and light yellow, before sinking, finally, into stunning whiteness.
Suddenly, we are marveled and uplifted, pulled out of our small, ordinary lives and taken to a realm far richer and more eloquent than anything we know.
Call it enchantment, the difference between the time-bound and the timeless, between us and the otherworldly. All beauty and art evoke harmonies that transport us to a place where, for only seconds, time stops and we are one with the world. It is the best life has to offer.
Under the spell of beauty, we experience a rare condition called plenitude, where we want for nothing. It isn’t just a feeling. Or if it is, then it’s a feeling like love — yes, exactly like love. Love, after all, is the most intimate thing we know. And feeling one with someone or something isn’t just an unrivaled condition, but one we do not want to live without.
We fall in love with sunsets and beaches, with tennis, with works of art, with places like Tuscany and the Rockies and the south of France, and, of course, with other people — not just because of who or what they are, but because they promise to realign us with our better selves, with the people we’ve always known we were but neglected to become, the people we crave to be before our time runs out.
André Aciman is the author of “Call Me by Your Name” and “Find Me.”
The marketing machines of modern life would have us believe that beauty is about physical attributes. With the benefit of the wisdom we have attained after many years spent traversing the planet as conservation photographers, we know otherwise.
Beauty has less to do with the material things around us, and more to do with how we spend our time on earth. We create true beauty only when we channel our energy to achieve a higher purpose, build strong communities and model our behavior so that others can find inspiration to do better by each other and our planet. Beauty has nothing to do with the latest makeup or fashion trends, and everything to do with how we live on this planet and act to protect it.
Every day we learn that species, landscapes and indigenous knowledge are vanishing before our eyes. That’s why we’ve dedicated our lives to reminding the world of the fragile beauty of our only home, and to protecting nature, not just for humanity’s sake, but for the benefit of all life on earth.
Committing our time, energy and resources to achieve these goals fills our lives with beauty.
Cristina Mittermeier and Paul Nicklen are conservation photographers and the founders of SeaLegacy .
Science enriches us by bringing us beauty in multiple forms.
Sometimes it can be found in the simplest manifestations of nature: the pattern of a nautilus shell; the colors and delicate shapes of a eucalyptus tree in full flower; the telescopic images of swirling galaxies, with their visual message of great mystery and vastness.
Sometimes it is the intricacy of the barely understood dynamics of the world’s molecules, cells, organisms and ecosystems that speaks to our imagination and wonder.
Sometimes there is beauty in the simple idea of science pursuing truth, or in the very process of scientific inquiry by which human creativity and ingenuity unveil a pattern within what had looked like chaos and incomprehensibility.
And isn’t there beauty and elegance in the fact that just four DNA nucleotides are patterned to produce the shared genetic information that underlies myriad seemingly unrelated forms of life?
Elizabeth Blackburn is a co-recipient of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
A person’s definition of beauty is an abstract, complicated and highly personal ideal that becomes a guiding light throughout life. We crave what we consider beautiful, and that craving can easily develop into desire, which in turn becomes the fuel that propels us into action. Beauty has the power to spawn aspiration and passion, thus becoming the impetus to achieve our dreams.
In our professional lives as fashion designers, we often deal with beauty as a physical manifestation. But beauty can also be an emotional, creative and deeply spiritual force. Its very essence is polymorphic. It can take on limitless shapes, allowing us to define it by what makes the most sense to us.
We are extremely fortunate to be living at a time when so many examples of beauty are being celebrated and honored, and more inclusive and diverse standards are being set, regardless of race, gender, sexuality or creed. Individuality is beautiful. Choice is beautiful. Freedom is beautiful.
Beauty will always have the power to inspire us. It is that enigmatic, unknowable muse that keeps you striving to be better, to do better, to push harder. And by that definition, what we all need most in today’s world is perhaps simply more beauty.
Lazaro Hernandez and Jack McCollough are the co-founders and designers of Proenza Schouler.
Beauty is just another way the tendency of our society to create hierarchies and segregate people expresses itself. The fact that over the past century certain individuals and businesses realized that it is incredibly lucrative to push upon us ever-changing beauty standards has only made things worse.
The glorification of impossible ideals is the foundation of the diet and beauty industries. And because of it, we find ourselves constantly in flux, spending however much money and time it takes to meet society’s standards. First, we didn’t want ethnic features. Now, we are all about plumping our lips and getting eye lifts in pursuit of a slanted eye. Skin-bleaching treatments and tanning creams. The ideal is constantly moving, and constantly out of reach.
The concept of beauty is a permanent obsession that permeates cultures around the world.
Jameela Jamil is an actress and the founder of the “I Weigh” movement .
The Life of Beauty
The sung blessing of creation
Led her into the human story.
That was the first beauty.
Next beauty was the sound of her mother’s voice
Rippling the waters beneath the drumming skin
Of her birthing cocoon.
Next beauty the father with kindness in his hands
As he held the newborn against his breathing.
Next beauty the moon through the dark window
It was a rocking horse, a wish.
There were many beauties in this age
For everything was immensely itself:
Green greener than the impossibility of green,
the taste of wind after its slide through dew grass at dawn,
Or language running through a tangle of wordlessness in her mouth.
She ate well of the next beauty.
Next beauty planted itself urgently beneath the warrior shrines.
Next was beauty beaded by her mother and pinned neatly
To hold back her hair.
Then how tendrils of fire longing grew into her, beautiful the flower
Between her legs as she became herself.
Do not forget this beauty she was told.
The story took her far away from beauty. In the tests of her living,
Beauty was often long from the reach of her mind and spirit.
When she forgot beauty, all was brutal.
But beauty always came to lift her up to stand again.
When it was beautiful all around and within,
She knew herself to be corn plant, moon, and sunrise.
Death is beautiful, she sang, as she left this story behind her.
Even her bones, said time.
Were tuned to beauty.
Joy Harjo is the United States poet laureate. She is the first Native American to hold the position.
Beauty is a positive and dynamic energy that has the power to convey emotion and express individuality as well as collectiveness. It can be felt through each of our senses, yet it is more magnificent when it transcends all five.
Over more than 30 years as a chef, I have experienced beauty unfolding through my cooking and in the creation of new dishes. Recipes have shown me that beauty is not a singular ingredient, object or idea, but the sum of the parts. Each dish has an appearance, a flavor, a temperature, a smell, a consistency and a nutritional value, but its triumph is the story all those parts tell together.
When my team and I launched Milan’s Refettorio Ambrosiano, our first community kitchen, in 2015, beauty was the guiding principle in our mission to nourish the homeless. We collaborated with artists, architects, designers and chefs to build a place of warmth, where gestures of hospitality and dignity would be offered to all. What I witnessed by bringing different people and perspectives around the table was the profound ability of beauty to build community. In a welcoming space, our guests had the freedom to imagine who they would like to be and begin to change their lives. In that space, beauty wielded the power of transformation.
When I visit the Refettorios that Food for Soul, the nonprofit I founded, has built around the world over the years, what strikes me as most beautiful is neither a table nor a chair nor a painting on the wall. Beauty is the spontaneity of two strangers breaking bread. It is the proud smile of a man who feels he has a place in the world. It is the emotion of that moment, and its power to fill a room with the celebration of life.
Massimo Bottura is a chef and the founder of Food for Soul .
Who wouldn’t argue that some things are objectively beautiful? Much of what we can see in the natural world would surely qualify: sunsets, snow-capped mountains, waterfalls, wildflowers. Images of these scenes, which please and soothe our senses, are among the most reproduced in all of civilization.
It’s true, of course, that we’re not the only creatures attracted to flowers. Bees and butterflies can’t resist them either — but that’s because they need flowers to survive.
Lying at the opposite end of the beauty spectrum are reptiles. They’ve had it pretty bad. Across decades of science fiction, their countenance has served as the model for a long line of ugly monsters, from Godzilla to the Creature in the “Creature From the Black Lagoon” to the Gorn in “Star Trek.”
There may be a good reason for our instinctive attraction to some things and distaste for others. If our mammalian ancestors, running underfoot, hadn’t feared reptilian dinosaurs they would have been swiftly eaten. Similarly, nearly everyone would agree that the harmless butterfly is more beautiful than the stinger-equipped bee — with the possible exception of beekeepers.
Risk of bodily harm appears to matter greatly in our collective assessment of what is or is not beautiful. Beauty could very well be a way for our senses to reassure us when we feel safe in a dangerous universe.
If so, I can’t help but wonder how much beauty lies just out of reach, hidden in plain sight, simply because we have no more than five senses with which to experience the world.
Neil deGrasse Tyson is an astrophysicist with the American Museum of Natural History, where he also serves as the Frederick P. Rose director of the Hayden Planetarium. He is the author of “Letters From an Astrophysicist.”
Beauty can stop us in our tracks. It can inspire us, move us, bring us to tears. Beauty can create total chaos, and then total clarity. The best kind of beauty changes hearts and minds.
That’s why the bravery of our girls is so beautiful — it can do all these things.
Over the past year, girls have moved us to tears with impassioned speeches about gun control, sexual assault and climate change. They have challenged the status quo and brought us clarity with their vision of the future. They have changed the hearts and minds of generations that are older, but not necessarily wiser.
Girls like Greta Thunberg and Isra Hirsi are fighting for the environment. Young women like Diana Kris Navarro, a Girls Who Code alumna, are leading efforts against harassment in tech. Girls like Lauren Hogg, a Parkland shooting survivor, and Thandiwe Abdullah, a Black Lives Matter activist, are speaking out against gun violence. The list goes on and on and on.
These girls are wise and brave beyond their years. They speak up because they care, not because they have the attention of a crowd or a camera. And they persist even when they’re told they’re too young, too small, too powerless — because they know they’re not.
Their bravery is beauty, redefined. And it’s what we need now, more than ever.
Reshma Saujani is the founder and chief executive of Girls Who Code and the author of “Brave, Not Perfect.”
I spend most of my waking hours (and many of my nightly dreams) thinking about beauty and its meaning. My whole life’s work has been an attempt to express beauty through design.
I see beauty as something ineffable, and I experience it in many ways. For example, I love gardening. The form and color of the flowers I tend to fill me with awe and joy. The time I spend in my garden frequently influences the shape of my gowns, as well as the objects that I choose to surround myself with. It even brings me closer to the people who have the same passion for it.
As humans, we all are more or less attuned to beauty. And because of this, we all try to engage with it one way or another — be it by being in nature, through poetry or by falling in love. And though our interaction with it can be a solitary affair, in the best cases, it connects people who share the same appreciation for it.
Beauty is what allows us to experience the extraordinary richness of our surroundings. Sensing it is like having a visa to our inner selves and the rest of the world, all at once. The interesting thing about beauty is that there is simply no downside to it: It can only enhance our lives.
Zac Posen is a fashion designer.
“The purpose of sex is procreation,” a straight cisgender man once told me, trying to defend his homophobia. “So that proves that homosexuality is scientifically and biologically wrong. It serves no purpose.”
I was quiet for a moment. “Huh,” I then said, “so … what’s the science behind blow jobs?” That shut him up real quick.
I often hear arguments that reduce human existence to a biological function, as if survival or productivity were our sole purpose, and the “bottom line” our final word. That is an attractive stance to take because it requires the least amount of energy or imagination. And for most animals, it’s the only option — the hummingbird sipping nectar is merely satisfying her hunger. She does not know her own beauty; she doesn’t have the capacity to perceive it. But we do. We enjoy art, music, poetry. We build birdfeeders. We plant flowers.
Only humans can seek out and express beauty. Why would we have this unique ability if we weren’t meant to use it? Even quarks, those fundamental parts at the core of life, were originally named after “beauty” and “truth.”
That’s why beauty matters to me. When we find beauty in something, we are making the fullest use of our biological capacities. Another way of putting it: When we become aware of life’s beauty, that’s when we are most alive.
Constance Wu is a television and film actress.
Advertisement
Home / Essay Samples / Life / Beauty / Beauty Standards: Redefining Beauty Beyond Conventions
Beauty Standards: Redefining Beauty Beyond Conventions
- Category: Life
- Topic: Beauty
Pages: 1 (662 words)
- Downloads: -->
Introduction
Evolution of beauty ideals, media and cultural influence, consequences of unrealistic standards, the importance of diversity, redefining beauty on personal terms.
--> ⚠️ Remember: This essay was written and uploaded by an--> click here.
Found a great essay sample but want a unique one?
are ready to help you with your essay
You won’t be charged yet!
Hope Essays
Compassion Essays
Loyalty Essays
Gratitude Essays
Passion Essays
Related Essays
We are glad that you like it, but you cannot copy from our website. Just insert your email and this sample will be sent to you.
By clicking “Send”, you agree to our Terms of service and Privacy statement . We will occasionally send you account related emails.
Your essay sample has been sent.
In fact, there is a way to get an original essay! Turn to our writers and order a plagiarism-free paper.
samplius.com uses cookies to offer you the best service possible.By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .--> -->