Unstable Standards Of Beauty Are Compared

Greymouth Evening Star, 12 March 1949, Page 8

Unstable Standards Of Beauty Are Compared

Pmifv il's pnrsviit, enjoyment and enltivation . . has beemne one of ihe world’s main occupations in the last half-century pH-nressed in terms of female beauty it accounts lor some of the riehes/and busiest industries and is said to employ, directly or md reellv al least 20 per cent, of lhe world’s working population. Ym iwibodv can tell von what beauty is, nor is it easy to discover a criterion Io act guide in setting standards, writes William Latimer in ihe Sydney Morning Herald. ~

Suppose, for example, that you agree that Ava Gardner, who was recently in “One Touch of Venus is one ‘of the most beautiful women cf today; or if you want an alternative, let us take the new dancer Cyd Chcii'issG • Granted that ond of these acti esses is very beautiful by contemporary standards—is she beautiful by the standards of any age? Would Rubens have bothered to look twice at either of them? Would Leonardo have dropped his paint brush while he was working on 'the Mona Lisa H cne of them had happened by? The first impulse is to answer yes. and to say that modern civilisation, in spite of its numerous complaints, is producing higher standards of beauty than ever before. But recall how our own personal tastes change. Think how fashions change. Look back at old newspapers and magazines—and not so far back either—if you would realise how unstable opinions about beauty can be. Silent Film Queens

snee for the existence of an ideal of glamour. , . . Today glamour means business, and big business at that. To keep the wheels c-oing round business demands a change in glamour styles almost as often as it calls for changes in women’s clothes. Styles Change Rapidly The tempo of this ringing of the changes has speeded up during the past 25 years. Skirt lengths change with the rapidity of a barometer. Curves go m and out. and up and down; hairdos arc never the same from one year to another; the shape of eyebrows; the expression and colour of the lips, fingernail styles, and a dozen other things that have to be changed many times m a few years,.if the modern woman is to keep pace with the glamour standard of the moment. It may be that in spite of these changes in glamour, genuine beauty remains a steadfast, immutable thing, which we can recognise, when it is truly present, no matter when and where it appears. If this is so, and we search the galleiies of history, we should find records of this kind of beauty. Actually they are very few and far between, but they do exist. Pre-Christian civilisation gives us two outstanding examples to speculate about: Nefertiti, Queen of Egypt in 1375 8.C., and the Venus of Milo about 200 B.C. Nefertiti looks remarkably modern. She was a young woman 3,324 years ago; but she looks like a modern girl in fancy dress. The Venus is beautiful, but is in a different class. She was not intended to represent a living person, but a Greek ideal of Beauty. Natural Advantages The emancipation of women from absurd conventions and the equally absurd clothes which went with them has done much to assist, in the discovery of natural beauty. Now photography has taken over from the artist and its factual basis has demonstrated on a wide scale that human beauty is not a mere vision of poets and artists. New all parents want their daughters to be beautiful; all young men want to marry beautiful wives, and every woman who has the slightest pretensions to natural beauty will do her darndest to be as beautiful as possible. And tor those who are not well endowed with the physical basis for ieauty there is always glamour, and. all its arls and subtle practices. For beauty is no longer an art. It is an indutry.

Think of the famous beauties of the silent film days, Mary Pickford, Norina Talmadge, Gloria Swanson. Go further back still to the days before films, and think of an accepted beauty of the Edwardian period, such as Isadore Duncan. ' Why do they seem to fall so much below our standards of beauty now; so much so that we laugh at the idea of them ever being thought beautiful? . , The answer, of course, is that as well as having a mysterious thing called beauty to inspire us, we have a mandate product called glamour. Fashions in glamour, which are founded on the human quest lor beauty, change with increasing reOne of the world’s most famous pin-up girls “The Mona Lisa, was painted by the Florentine genius, Leonardo Da Vinci. People have raved about the Mona Lisa for 000 years. But if she came to life and tried to get a job as a model, or went to try her luck in Hollywood, how would she make out? She would nrobably find the going tough. P lhc cultivation of glamour is as ancient as the quest for beauty. If by clamour we understand the gilding of the lilv especially when the lily is not quite so beautiful as it thinks it ought to be. then evidence for the existence of glamour is more ancient than evid-