New Books About Fashion and Beauty

Beautiful book worms, take note.

I recently came across three soon-to-be-released books that you might be interested in:

The Aesthetics Economy of Fashion: Markets and Value in Clothing and Modelling by Joanne Entwistle

Available August 2009.

Fashion is bound up with promoting the “new,” concerned with constantly changing aesthetics. The favored styles or looks of a season arise out of the work of a vast range of different actors who collectively produce, select, distribute and promote the new ideals, before moving on next season. If fashion is defined, in part, by the incessant requirement to be “new,” this requirement means aesthetic qualities are always in motion and, therefore, unstable. How, then, are fashionable commodities stabilized long enough for them to be calculated–i.e., selected, distributed and sold–by those critically placed inside the fashion system? Since there are few studies that actually examine the work that goes on inside the world of fashion we know little about these processes. Fashion and the Cultural Economy addresses this gap in our knowledge by examining how aesthetic products are defined, distributed and valued. It focuses attention on the work of some of the market agents, in particular model agents or ” bookers” and fashion buyers, shaping the aesthetics inside their markets. In analyzing their work, Entwistle develops a theoretical framework for understanding the distinctive features of aesthetic marketplaces and the aesthetic calculations within them.

Joanne Entwistle is a senior research fellow at the London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London.
 

Imagining Beauty: The History of the Global Beauty Business by Geoffrey Jones

Available February 2010.

The global beauty business permeates our lives, influencing how we perceive ourselves and what it is to be beautiful. The brands and firms that have dominated this industry, such as L’Oreal, Unilever, Rimmel, and Chanel, have re-imagined beauty for us. This book provides the first authoritative history of the global beauty industry from its emergence in the nineteenth century to the present day, exploring how today’s global giants grew. It shows how industry has shaped perceptions of beauty worldwide as beauty ideals were imagined by successive generations of entrepreneurs. These men and women built brands which interpreted prevailing societal norms, as well as the business organizations needed to sell them. They democratized access to beauty products, once the privilege of elites, but they also imagined the gender and ethnic borders of beauty, and its association with a handful of cities, notably Paris and later New York. The result was an extraordinary homogenization of beauty ideals throughout the world. However, over the last two decades globalization has worked in a more complex fashion, both encouraging further homogenization as global beauty brands entered China, Russia and India, but also encouraging heterogeneity through hyper-segmentation strategies and providing consumers with far greater choices. In the early twenty first century, beauty is in the process of being re-imagined again, with profound consequences for today’s managers and consumers.

Geoffrey Jones is a business professor at Harvard.
 

Because Your Worth It: The Ugly Face of the Beauty Business by Ruth Brandon

Available January 2011.

Book description not yet available.

Ruth Brandon is a biographer, historian, and novelist.

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