Beauty and business seem opposite terms but in fact have had an important and consequential relationship that business historians are only now exploring. This paper sketches several major themes and approaches to the topic. The first is the emergence of a large sector of the economy devoted to selling beauty aids, fashions, bodily care, and style to American women and men. Another is the deployment of beauty as a business strategy—in creating brands, sales, and marketing; in managing the workplace; and in projecting corporate identities. A third considers the sale of beauty itself, as a value added and attached to a wide range of goods, from art to bodies. These broad approaches suggest new directions for future research.

Detachable collars, essential to men’s appearance from the 1840s to the 1920s, have left a lasting legacy: the term ‘white collar’ and the “Arrow Man,” the centerpiece of Arrow collar advertisements from 1907 until 1931. The Arrow Man was the visual representation of the “New Man,” and Arrow collars were preserved in American culture through the lyrics of a 1934 Cole Porter song, “You’re the Top.” Both the Arrow collar and the Arrow Man derived from business decisions that reflected emerging and changing American consumer tastes and markets, an expanding middle class, and shifts in culture, especially in new ideal images of manliness that were less class-based, contributing to Americans’ impression that social distinctions were more blurred than in the past. The Arrow Man embodied in a single compelling image the resolution of social contradictions that persisted beneath the increased similarity of men of different backgrounds.

The Afro originated in the United States as a style worn by a tiny minority of cosmopolitan black women and developed as a prominent symbol of racial pride in the mid-1960s. Responding to the Afro's grassroots popularity, the African American beauty culture industry mounted a largely successful effort to transform the style from political statement to fashion commodity. But the commodification of the Afro was not exclusively a cynical exploitation of a political symbol. Rather, the selling of the Afro often entailed a complex blending of ideals, goals, and motivations based, to varying degrees, on considerations of fashion, politics, and the bottom line.

As the public discussion of all cancers, and of breast cancer in particular, expanded after World War II, capitalist ventures emerged to meet the demands of those affected by the disease. For women who had mastectomies this meant a greater choice of breast prostheses but also a clearer message that the scars from surgery should be hidden from public view. This work analyzes the breast prosthesis industry as a beauty business. Considering the use of breast prostheses as a contested part of cancer recovery, the article traces the evolution and expansion of the breast prosthesis industry from 1945 to 2000 and examines how the industry has responded to consumer demand, created a niche for itself within the “healing process,“ and capitalized on notions of feminine beauty.

Beauty culture shaped the work experiences of women factory operatives and office staff at the Maidenform company in complex ways during the 1940s and 1950s. Through advertising, the company newsletter, beauty contests, “Pin-Up of the Month” competitions, and the ultra-feminine form made possible by the company's brassieres and girdles, Maidenform helped define postwar commercial beauty culture. Maidenform employees also had a hand in defining beauty culture, making it an important part of workplace sociability. In the process of producing and consuming workplace beauty culture at Maidenform, women from a wide range of class and ethnic backgrounds participated in the dominant gender ideal fostered by their employer. At the same time, however, their work culture remained rooted in their own class and ethnic identities. This article will examine the ways in which working women at Maidenform used commercial beauty culture to negotiate these divergent identities.