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Modern Vanity: Consumption,
the Body Beautiful and the
New Political Subject
According to Sander Gilman, the rise of Enlightenment reason brought
with it a new imperative – self-improvement:
You can make yourself happy through being able to act in the world.
This was mirrored in the rise of modern notions of the citizen as
well as the revolutionary potential of the individual [...] ‘Sapere
Aude!’ wrote Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), ‘“Dare to use your own
reason” – is the motto of the Enlightenment.’ The ability to remake
one’s self is the heart of the matter. The Enlightenment self-remaking
took place in public and was dependent on being ‘seen’ by others as
transformed. This extended to the shaping of the body, even within
the world of fashion.
(Gilman, 1999, p. 18)
Enlightenment thinking, Gilman argues, made consumer practices
aimed at self-improvement through the appearance virtuous rather than
vain, even potentially revolutionary. In this book, we are interested in
how vanity became a technology of self through the contemporary consumer imperative of self-improvement. In the chapters that follow we
examine key sites of vanity for late modern neoliberal subjects – health,
beauty and fitness, anti-ageing, reality television and the internet. First
we explore how vanity is assigned to contemporary consumers as both
a desirable and a dangerous trait. We ask how vanity informs understandings of contemporary subjects and their practices of consumption.
We consider recent examples of critical approaches to consumer culture, consumer studies and market research before turning to older
references to vanity in literature and the arts. In so doing we map the
mobility of investments in vanity, as at once moral and immoral, trivial
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C. Tanner et al., Vanity: 21st Century Selves
© Claire Tanner, JaneMaree Maher and Suzanne Fraser 2013
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Vanity
and significant, with respect to broader debates about consumption and
self-improvement.
To provide the necessary context for present-day understandings
of vanity, this chapter examines the rise of the modern consumer at
the turn of the twentieth century. Along with the advent of mechanised manufacturing, the production of cheap goods, and advances
in visual technologies came new forms of self-production and public
visibility. It was thus at this time that recognisably modern consumer
cultures emerged, coalescing with the Enlightenment project of selfimprovement, undertaken in spectacular fashion. Modernity was
mapped onto gendered bodies in ways that transformed those bodies
and, in so doing, the meaning of self-regard, or vanity, itself. As bodies came to figure in new ways as expressions of Enlightenment reason
(shaped by nascent physical, fashion and beauty cultures), ideal bodies
were put on public display, producing new ‘good’ vanities of the self.
To explore the significance of these developments, we draw on a range
of contemporary historical sources produced in the period 1900–10,
including women’s magazines, journals, newspapers, promotional
material, books and parliamentary debates. We thereby demonstrate
how early twentieth-century modernity created new opportunities
for self-transformation for proper subjects. In particular, we look
at two influential movements during this period: Eugen Sandow’s
physical culture movement, and the women’s suffrage movement.
Examining these two phenomena in the broader context of modernity,
we argue that consumer practices, always open to criticism as trivial
and narcissistic, were also integral to purportedly virtuous twentiethcentury projects of self-improvement.
In almost all of their forms, Western projects of self-improvement
demand engagement with consumer cultures. As this chapter will show,
these processes and practices of self-improvement have long been accompanied by ambivalence. Where does the modern, self-transforming subject
stand in relation to vanity? Are practices of self-improvement morally
compulsory, and in that sense profound, or are they self-indulgent and
thus the opposite of profound: facile and trivial? As we argue, vanity
plays both an explicit and implicit role in the range of value-laden ways
in which consumers are understood.
In contemporary Western societies, consumer practices are endlessly
debated. Academics, politicians, economists, environmentalists, journalists, policymakers and social commentators all have a stake in consumer
culture, its origins, drivers and outcomes. Psychologists research the drives
and behaviours of consumers (Dittmar, 1992; Dittmar, Beattie and Friese,