The making of modern beauty pageants – traditions, myth, tales, and histories Cover Image

The making of modern beauty pageants – traditions, myth, tales, and histories
The making of modern beauty pageants – traditions, myth, tales, and histories

Author(s): Vlad Mihăilă
Subject(s): History
Published by: Institutul de Cercetări Socio-Umane Gheorghe Şincai al Academiei Române
Keywords: beauty pageants; femininity; history; myths; traditions; national identity

Summary/Abstract: This article traces in a comparative manner the creation of modern beauty pageants in the US, France, and Romania. It will argue that beauty pageants played a significant role in devising a visible embodiment of national identity – “Miss Romania”, the nation’s most beautiful woman. The first national beauty pageants were held during the years following World War One and quickly became a global phenomenon. However novel and “modern”, beauty pageants did not arrive on the historical scene ex nihilo but were the result of previous social and cultural developments that can be traced to the middle of the 19th century. In the United States, beauty contests were created on the foundations set by 19th century cultural revival movements of medieval festivals and pageantry. Travelling across the Atlantic in the immediate aftermath of the “Great War”, they were adopted by European nations and molded on the basis of Greco-Roman aesthetic ideals under the supervision of Maurice de Waleffe, a Parisian journalist and creator of “Miss France” and “Miss Europe”. In Romania, modern beauty pageants followed Western organizational patterns, at the same time striving to create a unique national identity for their winners. A symbol of national pride and identity, “Miss Romania” was culturally constructed as a modern embodiment of traditional, historical, and mythological traits, virtues, and physical qualities defined by organizers and contemporary intellectuals as belonging exclusively to the Romanian nation. This article will highlight some of the ideological and discursive elements that defined both what “true” Romanian beauty meant and the ways in which this identity could be bestowed upon the winners of the country’s first national beauty pageants. It will also strive to prove that Romanian intellectuals appropriated Western aesthetic canons and blended them with local and regional ideas in a process defined by historian Eric J. Hobsbawm as “the invention of tradition”. The resulting definitions attached to “national” feminine beauty rested on the cultural and historical recovery of popular stories, myths, traditions, and artifacts. What resulted was a unique blend of Western and Eastern ideals of beauty, a fluid and contradictory feminine image that was inherently tied to the Romanian cultural context of the 1920s and 1930s.

  • Issue Year: 2017
  • Issue No: 20
  • Page Range: 107-125
  • Page Count: 19
  • Language: English