Modernist Beauty Cultures: Mina Loy and Elizabeth Arden's Gendered Economies of Ageing

This article explores Mina Loy's ambivalent responses to youth culture and the twentieth-century beauty industry through her poetry, pamphlets, and anti-ageing inventions. The article opens with a close reading of the gendered economy of ageing found in Loy's early poems, before putting Loy's inventions in dialogue with another modern woman – beauty entrepreneur, Elizabeth Arden – drawing connections between their modernist aesthetic strategies to promote anti-ageing. Overall, this article considers the implications of Loy's ambivalent responses to the anti-ageing industry, even as she critiqued the gendered economies that pit youth against age, tracing points of connection between modernist experiments, cultural gerontology, and consumerism.