Cultural historian Georges Vigarello talks about the perception of beauty and the canons of attractiveness from the 16th century (when female beauty was understood as a kind of divine gift) to the present day.
The history of attractiveness, described in detail and fascinatingly in the book of the French cultural historian Georges Vigarello, begins in the XNUMXth century, when female beauty was comprehended as something valuable and even “divine”. However, the poets sang about the beautiful face, luminous eyes and white hands of the beauty, but not her body. The attractiveness of a man was not considered at all: it was believed that he should be strong, hairy and ugly. The book is devoted to the gradual change of these canons. The body of a woman, her figure, until the end of the XNUMXth century, did not belong to herself, but was completely under the control of fashion designers and tailors, who, with the help of fabrics, corsets and draperies, create her “shape”. And only in the XNUMXth century did a woman cease to be a doll with a pretty face, wrapped in beautiful rags. A slender, trained body becomes the main component of female attractiveness, and making it so is in the power of the woman herself. The last (so far) page in the history of attractiveness is our time, the beginning of the XNUMXst century. Now men have ceased to be perceived only and predominantly as the «stronger sex», and women have ceased to be the only «fair sex». Women are no less concerned about the condition of their muscles than men are about the smoothness of their skin and the attractiveness of their faces.
UFO, 432 p.