Christina E. Firpo, "Beauty and the Nation: Women, Culture, and the National Image in Interwar Vietnam" (Columbia UP, 2025)

Interwar Vietnam experienced a rapid transformation in beauty culture as women moved away from traditional, sequestered roles toward modern, expressive identities. Christina Firpo, author of *Beauty and the Nation*, examines how fashion, cosmetics, and physical culture became contested sites for negotiating Vietnamese modernity under French colonial rule. Women’s choices regarding dress, makeup, and leisure activities functioned as individual assertions of identity, despite public controversy and conservative backlash. While colonial authorities and nationalists attempted to use the female body to define national strength and respectability, ordinary women utilized these trends to claim agency in a changing society. By analyzing diverse sources—including newspapers, business records, and GIS data—Firpo reveals that these beauty practices were not merely superficial, but were integral to the broader, tumultuous political and social shifts defining the Vietnamese nation during the 1920s and 1930s.