A01=Christina E. Firpo
Author_Christina E. Firpo
Category=JBCC3
Category=JBSF1
Category=NH
Category=NHF
Category=NHTB
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_new_release
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
history
Product details
- ISBN 9780231208871
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 06 Jan 2026
- Publisher: Columbia University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
During the interwar years, Vietnamese society witnessed a rapid change in the way women looked. Rejecting the model of a sequestered maiden with blackened teeth and long hair, they embraced a vivid palette of colors—and a colorful lifestyle to match. Before the war, Vietnam would have seemed like an unlikely place for a beauty industry to thrive. Virtuous young women were expected to hide their natural beauty, not manipulate it with makeup or flaunt it at a beauty contest. Yet ordinary women began seeking out the latest fashions—to great public consternation.
Christina E. Firpo explores the development of beauty culture in this period, showing how women’s faces and bodies became contested sites for envisioning what it meant to be Vietnamese in the modern world. She considers dress patterns, lip-lining tutorials, hairstyles, physiques, and beauty pageants alongside new technologies of media, transportation, and leisure and the anxieties they provoked. The everyday decisions women made about their appearance, Firpo argues, were ways to stake a claim to the roles they wanted to play in the new society taking shape around them. Drawing on a vast array of sources, Beauty and the Nation offers fresh insight into the tumultuous political, economic, social, and cultural changes that swept across Vietnam during this crucial period.
Christina E. Firpo explores the development of beauty culture in this period, showing how women’s faces and bodies became contested sites for envisioning what it meant to be Vietnamese in the modern world. She considers dress patterns, lip-lining tutorials, hairstyles, physiques, and beauty pageants alongside new technologies of media, transportation, and leisure and the anxieties they provoked. The everyday decisions women made about their appearance, Firpo argues, were ways to stake a claim to the roles they wanted to play in the new society taking shape around them. Drawing on a vast array of sources, Beauty and the Nation offers fresh insight into the tumultuous political, economic, social, and cultural changes that swept across Vietnam during this crucial period.
Christina E. Firpo is professor of history at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. She is the author of Black Market Business: Selling Sex in Northern Vietnam, 1920–1945 (2020) and The Uprooted: Race, Children, and Imperialism in French Indochina, 1890–1980 (2016).
