The Business of Beauty

Gender and the Body in Modern London

Jessica P. Clark

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781350098503
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350098527
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Fashion Design

The Business of Beauty is a unique exploration of the history of beauty, consumption, and business in Victorian and Edwardian London. Illuminating national and cultural contingencies specific to London as a global metropolis, it makes an important intervention by challenging the view of those who-like their historical contemporaries-perceive the 19th and early 20th centuries as devoid of beauty praxis, let alone a commercial beauty culture.

Contrary to this perception, The Business of Beauty reveals that Victorian and Edwardian women and men developed a number of tacit strategies to transform their looks including the purchase of new goods and services from a heterogeneous group of urban entrepreneurs: hairdressers, barbers, perfumers, wigmakers, complexion specialists, hair-restorers, manicurists, and beauty "culturists." Mining trade journals, census data, periodical print, and advice literature, Jessica P. Clark takes us on a journey through Victorian and Edwardian London's beauty businesses, from the shady back parlors of Sarah "Madame Rachel" Leverson to the elegant showrooms of Eugène Rimmel into the first Mayfair salon of Mrs. Helena Titus, aka Helena Rubinstein.

By revealing these stories, Jessica P. Clark revises traditional chronologies of British beauty consumption and provides the historical background to 20th-century developments led by Rubinstein and others. Weaving together histories of gender, fashion, and business to investigate the ways that Victorian critiques of self-fashioning and beautification defined both the buying and selling of beauty goods, this is a revealing resource for scholars, students, fashion followers, and beauty enthusiasts alike.

1

“Backmewsy” Beauty: Agnes Headman and Aimée Lloyd

In February 1858, Mrs. Agnes Headman of 24 Savile Row died, leaving behind her a profitable London-based business as a “Hair Restorer and Advisor to Ladies on the State of their Hair.” Headman (c.1808–1858) had developed a following of West End customers who patronized her hair dyeing services, but also purchased manufactures like “Rejuvenescent Hair Cream” and “Botanic Hair Wash and Curling Fluid,” which she produced in her backroom laboratory. Through services and goods, Headman promised to enhance female clients’ natural beauty, all the while maintaining discretion about their patronage of her West End location.¹

Just around the corner on Glasshouse Street, another female trader worked to produce one of London’s best-selling and enigmatic grooming products marketed to men, a waterless shaving cream known as “Euxesis.” In contrast to Agnes Headman’s independent venture, Aimée Lloyd (b. 1828) labored as part of a family unit and contributed to the Lloyds’s household economy. When her husband proved abusive and indolent, she found herself “wholly destitute” in both the economic and personal sense. She subsequently turned to profits from “Euxesis” for her survival. Her efforts did not go unnoticed; before long, celebrated London wholesaler Robert Hovenden (1830–1908) attempted to procure the secret formula for “Euxesis.” When Lloyd refused, she and Hovenden embarked on a protracted legal battle over the shaving cream, which she eventually won with the support of character witnesses from the local business community. Euxesis continued to be produced into the twentieth century, although Lloyd herself disappears from the historical record.²

Despite their differences, Agnes Headman and Aimée Lloyd’s experiences suggest those of a handful of beauty businesswomen who lived and worked in London’s West End in the mid-nineteenth century. Their stories highlight shared elements that periodically featured in small-scale beauty enterprises, both male- and female-owned. They speak to the presence of small-scale ventures in modest “backmewsy” spaces, contiguous to more successful luxury beauty “emporiums” located on London’s leading commercial corridors like Bond Street. They also demonstrate the ways that traders’ linkages to family networks could both engender and work against their commercial enterprise. Alternatively, traders could depend upon particular commercial actors, specifically agents and wholesalers, to help substantiate their local reputation. Indeed, Headman, Lloyd, and other small-scale entrepreneurs operated in broader occupational networks of retail and manufacturing perfumers, hairdressers, and “beauty advisors.” These communities could function as a site of belonging, but also as a mechanism of exclusion for traders who transgressed conventional social mores, as we will explore further in Chapter 2. Finally, the cases of Headman and Lloyd provide examples of mid-century beauty marketing campaigns in popular print periodicals, revealing the ways that elaborate, increasingly expensive forms of self-promotion came to be dominated by more successful, oftentimes male counterparts.

As part of London’s small contingent of mid-nineteenth-century beauty businesses, women’s enterprises contributed to the foundations of Britain’s modern commercial beauty industry, alongside those of increasingly elaborate, typically male-owned firms. Clustered in London’s West End, men’s and women’s shops were scattered along Mayfair and St. James’s stately commercial thoroughfares and the more contested terrain of its plebeian neighbors to the east, St. James Westminster and St. Anne’s Soho. Hierarchies of space operated in these contiguous spaces and shaped the material conditions of the West End perfumery and hairdressing market. In the West End, male and female vendors capitalized on a burgeoning Victorian beauty culture to consolidate a new luxury trade for elite and middle-class consumers.

Charting the stories of Agnes Headman and Aimée Lloyd—and their personal and economic connections to family-in-law, business rivals, and occupational communities—is an exercise in complicating standard stories about entrepreneurial success. By moving away from the lauding of singular achievements of industry leaders, we craft alternative entrepreneurial narratives that repopulate the commercial landscapes of West End enterprise. Traders operating at the center and on the margins of London’s beauty business were part of a dense spatial concentration of mid- and small-sized firms, in a dynamic business environment engendered by their close proximity.³ Headman and Lloyd were just two of a number of traders populating the West End beauty trades, and yet their stories offer general insights into economic challenges and resourcefulness, interleaved with moments of love and violence. They also allow us to observe the complex nature of London’s mid-century urban geography and its inhabitants, how gender operated “on the ground,” and the interconnections between urban networks and business practices, all as they unfolded in a discreet commercial milieu. Ultimately, male and female beauty traders’ spatial concentration in the West End and along the borders of St. James Westminster and St. Anne’s Soho contributed to a commercial atmosphere that was not only dynamic and creative but also competitive.⁴ Regardless of merchants’ class or gender, their intense concentration in this geographic and economic atmosphere engendered what economist Alfred Marshall characterized as “a continuous interplay between competition and cooperation,” in this case in the beauty market.⁵ This included the “backmewsy” operations of more humble beauty providers; an exploration of them moves them from the peripheries of scholarly considerations of Victorian enterprise to center stage as representative entrepreneurs in a metropolitan commercial environment out of which successful individual ventures emerged.⁶ In other words, small-scale entrepreneurs—including some women—were important players in Victorian London’s beauty business. Their presence contributed to later successes of London’s professionalizing perfumers and hairdressers on national and global stages.

Building a British Beauty Business

Agnes Headman and Aimée Lloyd were part of a compact network of mid-century traders who discreetly enhanced Londoners’ appearance. Until the late nineteenth century, however, there was no formal, capitalist “beauty industry” in London and especially not one catering exclusively to female clientele.⁷ Through the eighteenth century, London’s commercial scene featured a notable perfumery trade based on skill and craftsmanship that serviced men and women of the city’s prosperous classes.⁸ Along with hairdressers and wig makers, these traders proffered the requisite items for elite eighteenth-century consumers to meet late-century trends: perfume, paint, powder, and towering perukes (Plate 1). Elite patronage reflected not only expanding urban markets in commodities but also new cultural and aesthetic associations relating to whiteness and British identity. Kim Hall argues that the early years of European colonization generated—and depended on—a new set of cultural connotations around a racialized hierarchy of lightness over darkness. The subsequent idealization of fairness imbued male and female beauty with symbolic functions related to moral purity as well as social and ethnic hegemony.⁹ These powerful new connotations expanded public interest in beautification beyond the elite and urban consuming classes. For example, early modern medical and domestic recipe books reveal that middling men and women practiced what Edith Snook terms “beautifying physic.” Early modern women engaged in home production, eschewing the overt “paints” targeted by anti-cosmetic satires in favor of cleansing washes, unguents, and complexion creams that “were manifestly a component of medical practice.”¹⁰

By the nineteenth century, London traders continued to offer consumers, primarily elite men, grooming tools and services necessary for communicating the civilized status of a fashionable public figure.¹¹ Meanwhile, new conceptions of bourgeois femininity consolidated linkages between physical beauty and women’s moral purity.¹² Emerging evangelical domestic ideology prescribed an idealized femininity, in which a woman’s physical appearance conveyed “the seasons of a woman’s life” or her connections to the natural world.¹³ This transformed the nature and appearance of women’s self-fashioning, when, by the mid-century, a domesticated white femininity defined by authenticity and artlessness emerged as the desirable form for a bourgeois wife. Pamphlets and didactic health literature deplored female cosmetic use as a sign of women’s duplicitous and immoral inner character.¹⁴ Middle-class women’s magazines, new cultural forms flourishing in the 1850s and 1860s, also reinforced the rejection of artifice in lieu of honesty about one’s physical beauty.¹⁵ Middle-class authors and critics derided beauty consumption as a habit of the debauched aristocratic classes, whose artifice mirrored their doubtful moral character.¹⁶

At the same time, the promotion of natural beauty foregrounded the importance of an attractive physical appearance as a marker of mental and bodily health. Public censure subsequently could not dissuade Victorian men and women from engaging in discreet practices of bodily self-fashioning...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Dedication Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Plates
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 “Backmewsy” Beauty:
• 2 Upstarts and Outliers:
• 3 Mobilizing Men:
• 4 Professionalizing Perfumery:
• 5 Female Enterprise at the Fin-de-Siècle:
• 6 From Beauty Culturists to Beauty Magnates:
• Epilogue
• Appendix I
• Appendix II
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index
• Plates Section
• Copyright Page