ABSTRACT
By the 1930s, Britons, like Americans, were articulating new consumer identities and embracing a belief that modern selfhood, success in life and self-respect were partially contingent on physical appearance, an attractive personality and an active engagement in the marketplace of body-oriented goods. This chapter explores responses alongside a series of contemporaneous advertisements in an effort both to dissect the culture of male beauty in the late 1930s and early 1940s and to explicate the rituals of social hygiene that partially guided men’s daily lives in this period. Britons in the late 1930s did not, however, need to rely on Mass-Observation alone to prompt them to consider physical attractiveness or the daily rituals of personal grooming. Fears about attracting the opposite sex were a regular feature as well in advertisements throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Building on the developments associated with the physical culture movement, a number of advertisers offered methods of physical transformation that promised.
