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The Women We Wanted to Look Like
Brigid Keenan
A witty, image-rich history of twentieth-century glamour, tracing the women and looks that millions longed to imitate — from the flappers of 1920s Paris to Madison Avenue chic. Former fashion editor Brigid Keenan moves through the film stars (Clara Bow, Garbo, Hayworth, Monroe, Taylor), the models (Twiggy, Veruschka), and the society beauties whose images set the template for a generation, alongside the designers who dressed the era — Chanel, Dior, Saint Laurent, Pucci, Quant. More than 200 photographs, many by masters like Cecil Beaton, Cartier-Bresson, and Man Ray, illustrate how ideals of beauty shifted decade by decade. Keenan writes with the knowing, irreverent voice of an insider, treating fashion as a serious cultural mirror without ever losing its pleasure. It is both a nostalgic scrapbook and a smart argument about how style, media, and desire shape what we want to look like.
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The author
Brigid Keenan (born 1939) is a British journalist and author who worked as a fashion editor at Nova, The Observer, and The Sunday Times before leaving the industry to write books and follow her diplomat husband's postings. She writes about fashion from the inside, with a reporter's eye and a memoirist's humor.
The book
The Women We Wanted to Look Like was published in 1977 (Macmillan, London; St. Martin's Press, New York, 1978). It surveys the changing icons of feminine style across the twentieth century, richly illustrated with more than 200 photographs, and notes among other things the influence of Black women on fashion — an acknowledgment ahead of many contemporaries.
How it has aged
The book remains a lively, intelligent social history of glamour, and its central insight — that beauty ideals are manufactured and mutable — has only become more obvious. Naturally its frame of reference stops in the 1970s, and some assumptions about celebrity and beauty read as of their time. But as a knowing, well-sourced tour of the century's style icons, it holds up as both entertainment and cultural history.
For more context
Pair with histories of twentieth-century couture and with studies of fashion photography.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Brigid Keenan
- Publisher
- Macmillan
- Place of publication
- London
- Year
- 1977
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- History
- Location
- Colorado