ABSTRACT
Beauty is seemingly frivolous, superficial, and female, the subject of aesthetics, art, poetry, and most recently, feminist criticism. Beauty and business may seem to exist in different domains but, as the new scholarship shows, their relationship grows ever closer and more significant. Business, in contrast, connotes serious, consequential, indeed manly activity, the intellectual domain of economists and social scientists. The field has been so much defined by studies of heavy industry and corporate power that the activities of hairdressers, fashion designers, and Avon ladies have largely gone unnoticed. But beauty is big business, with large-scale production, international distribution networks, media-saturation advertising, scientific marketing, and sales in the billions of dollars. Ideals of beauty are fundamentally shaped by social relations and institutions, by other cultural categories and practices, and by politics and economics. Beauty, fashion, and style are threaded through the history of American business as products for sale, as systems of representations, and as categories of taste and discrimination.
