The Culture of Male Beauty in Britain

"In The Culture of Male Beauty in Britain, Paul Deslandes offers the definitive account of how notions of male beauty changed in Britain over the past few centuries. With both fluid prose and 120 carefully selected images, Deslandes traces the sustained and culturally significant, masculine engagement with beauty culture in Britain from the nineteenth century to the present, including considerations of advertising, health, pornography, psychology, sport, and celebrity culture. Deslandes'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"--

Paul R. Deslandes is professor and chair of the Department of History at the University of Vermont and is the author of Oxbridge Men: British Masculinity and the Undergraduate Experience, 1850-1920. He lives in Shelburne, Vermont.