To our concept of fashion we invariably attach words like style and beauty and the history of admiring beauty is an undeniable aspect of the human experience. Certainly beauty began being put on a pedestal as far back as the first creations of art and mythology and our familiarity with Western civilization’s Goddess of Love and Beauty, Venus, attests to this. Though notions of beauty have varied and continue to vary from culture to culture, it is considered a virtue and worthy of attention. What is more recent and maybe peculiar to some, though not to all, is the beauty pageant and the public ceremony of beauty judgment.

The history of beauty pageantry as some kind of ceremonial and public event is more recently documented as a phenomenon of the late 1800’s, although the celebration of beauty has surely been part of community life for millenia. In the mid-1800’s the entertaining and enterprising P.T.Barnum held the first American beauty pageant which, though unsuccessful in its reception, opened the door to this kind of show for the increasingly media- and spectacle- oriented American public. By the 1880’s, aided by the availability of photography, the first Bathing Beauty Pageant was held on the East Coast and by 1921 Americans could behold the first Miss America Pageant. Though initially these pageants were not received very well, by World War II when young women were employed as beauty figures to sell war bonds, they gradually developed a wider following.

People, men and women alike, have always been able to distinguish among themselves who is deemed more or less attractive according to a cultural norm but the pageantry of beauty is interesting in our time period for the sometimes controversial factors involved and for the questions it raises in an inquisitive and introspective culture. Whether beauty contestants should be judged for more than their appearances, whether contestants have cosmetically enhanced their appearances, whether their public and/or private persona is considered worthy of public celebration, and even the question of how and why we should judge children in beauty pageants are controversies that surface from time to time. That humans experience so much through vision probably means that beauty pageants and judgments based largely on appearances for the public spectacle will remain part of our cultural experience. How we interpret this experience is what is interesting as is how our notions of beauty may change over time.

image: sculpture, Venus de Milo
image: painting, Birth of Venus, Sandro Botticelli

Ancient Replica Goddesses Aphrodite of Melos Statue Bust of Aphrodite Venus of Lespugue Venus of Willendorf

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Tags: 1800s, Ancient Replica Goddesses, Aphrodite of Melos Statue, art, Bathing Beauty Pageant 1921, beauty and culture, beauty history, beauty pageants, beauty world war 2, Birth of Venus, Bust of Aphrodite, ceremony, goddess, goddess of love, judgment of beauty, miss america, P.T. Barnum and beauty pageants, pageants history, Sandro Botticelli, society, venus, Venus de Milo, Venus goddess of beauty, Venus of Lespugue, Venus of Willendorf, WWII