What Started Over Coffee.

This blog is born out of both friendship and intellectual curiosity. We met more years ago now than either of us would care to admit as graduate students in U.S. history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. What started as a study group quickly became a deep and abiding friendship built on a shared passion for history and love of fashion. Over the course of two years, we spent endless hours discussing each. More often than not, we talked about both. When we should have been focusing on the competing concepts of liberty and republicanism during the American Revolution or the changing definition of racial identity in the South, we were as likely to be flipping through nineteenth-century beauty manuals or discussing the rise of the New Woman and the radical change in clothing, and the clothing industry, that she inspired. We talked – over coffee, at dinner, and more than once in the Nordstrom's dressing room – about shifting perceptions of beauty and fashion and how those changes reflected historical shifts in society and gender roles. Although we both eventually decided the academic life was not for us, and our subsequent careers have taken us to opposite coasts, the friendship remains and the conversations continue, informed too now by our experiences as modern women seeking our way in today's still male-dominated corporate world. We hope this blog will be a springboard, along with your comments, for our further exploration of the social implications of beauty ideals, of how the clothes quite literally make the woman (or man), to define American beauty. Welcome to the conversation.