beauty standards

One of the fun things to look at in the Metropolitan museum is the way artists portray women's breasts—because while you might imagine that the modern obsession with large breasts is universal, in fact ideal breasts vary from cultural moment to cultural moment.  In particular, it is pretty clear that the Renaissance favored small breasts.  The corsets in fashion at that time created an upper body shape similar to the shape of a man's chest in armor.  It seems the women's corsets squashed their breasts out sideways to create this effect.  And Renaissance nudes' breasts are influenced by the way women looked when clothed:  their breasts are not large, sit low on the chest, and are quite far apart.  In the 18th and 19th centuries, by contrast, women's breasts reflect a different kind of corset:  they are larger, higher, and closer together. But what about *male* body parts?

We have been giving fashion history tours at the Metropolitan Museum for several months now, and the more we work on them, the more we see that fashion history is probably the biggest theme in the entire museum.  If you think about it, you might think thathttps://shadyladiestours.com/fashion-and-beauty-tour/beauty—human beauty—is the biggest theme in the art history.  But if you look carefully at the beautiful people in the museum, you will see that (aside perhaps from the Greek male nudes), the person's features are only a secondary aspect of the images.  It isn't their natural beauty that makes people beautiful in art.  Instead, the artworks focus on many other aspects of the beautiful person:  on hairdos and make-up and jewelry and clothing and accessories and shoes.  In short, human beauty in art consists not of beautiful features, but of costume or fashion.

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