A Turn in Beauty Culture: The Evolution of Personal Beauty Standards through the Qajars to Pahlavi Era

During the first decades of last century, the standards of beauty among Iranians witnessed a significant change. A survey of late nineteenth and early twenties century photographs, and comparing them with countless remaining photographs of 1930s and 1940s, namely at the time of passing through the Qajar times and succession of Pahlavi dynasty, demonstrates a move to new beauty models, which replaced the old typical Qajar beauty standards. This essay, with studying the -visual and verbal- historical texts of this time, intends to study the processes by which the modern Western aesthetic models in personal appearance became the normal Iranian models.
A survey through visual history of Iran, from the ancient civilizations to the very beginning of Qajar dynasty, clearly embodies a general way of image-making for the physical appearance and gestures of men and women, which rarely seems odd or detestable to the contemporary viewer. But, in the mid-Qajar dynasty’s visual resources, and specifically Naser al-Din Shah’s rein, appears particular standards of feminine beauty thoroughly different from its former and latter standards. The photographs of royal women and courtesans of “Naseri” and “Mozaffari” periods cannot be considered indisputable proof of feminine beauty model of Qajar era. Notwithstanding, this model, itself ambiguous in origins and precedence, saw a fundamental alteration in a brief time; round face, plump belly and thighs and buttocks, and the delicate line of moustache above the upper lip, became inelegant signs in a woman’s appearance.
In this period, Iranians encountered a new western beauty model, through visual communication system of western world (I. e. illustrated publications, photography, and cinema), via postcards, magazines, memento photographs, and movies. These visual media played a key role in westernization of outward appearance and features of Iranians lives. This process of replacing western model was so radical and rapid, that Qajar-type beauty standards seems quite unbelievable today. Western-type personal beauty acquired a mythical aspect; a predominant myth, which manifested itself as natural, postulate, and eternal; although a construction of dominant orders, like visual communication system, in reality.
The most recent European fashion journals were available for Iranian citizens from the 1930s onward; Likewise, Iranian magazines and newspapers promoted the same discourse about beauty as western media, in which image of modern Iranian femininity, and masculinity as well, increasingly relied on adaptation of last western fashions and modes of appearance and gestures. With popularity of cinema in Iran, as a medium which addressed a mass audience from different social classes, the process of adaptation of western beauty culture amplified. Not surprisingly, a great number of religious and non-religious traditionalists severely challenged this new visual medium. However, despite all oppositions, and in spite of obvious contradictions between western film productions and traditional Iranian culture, cinema enjoyed a great popularity in Iran, and had a massive impact on Iranian’s way of life.
Transformations in clothing systems and personal beauty models was not always a result of imperative politics of Iranian governments, but a consequence of worldwide cultural policies, as enormous myth-making systems.