Stacy A. Cordery’s biography of entrepreneur Elizabeth Arden (1881–1966) demonstrates Arden’s skillful creation of a powerful brand. Arden did not produce a memoir or preserve archival papers, yet Cordery successfully traces the evolution of Arden’s business. Becoming Elizabeth Arden analyzes an impressive array of sources, including published advertisements and interviews; items from diverse archival collections of Arden’s associates, friends, and contacts; and digitized primary source collections. Cordery traces Arden’s life chronologically through short chapters focused on specific events, themes, and endeavors. Written in a narrative style accessible to general audiences, the book also provides detailed footnotes.
Although Arden’s Red Door salons, Eight Hour Cream, and Blue Grass perfume remain famous, the variety of Arden’s work will likely surprise contemporary readers. Cordery demonstrates that Arden controlled factories and warehouses, deployed product demonstrators to encourage department store sales, pursued early experimentation with radio and television to promote her brand, and collaborated with fashion designers on original clothing sold in Arden salons. Arden designed travel cases that provided appealing packaging for cosmetics, tailoring these plans to specific contexts, as with a bag designed to house cosmetics alongside protective gas masks for European customers in 1939. Reflecting a reach beyond cosmetics, Arden introduced an influential “color harmony” system marketing cosmetics shades coordinated with clothing trends. In salons and through audio recordings, Arden promoted exercise as “one of America’s earliest mainstream yoga practitioners” (86). Exhibiting a “never-ending commitment to innovation,” Arden retained lifelong control of the corporation she created, rejecting multiple acquisition offers (358).
Across this career, Arden successfully navigated cultural norms of gender and class to claim professional authority. Sexist business customs affected women cosmetics entrepreneurs, even as their industry focused on women consumers. Cordery asserts that male entrepreneurs’ reputations benefitted from the social activities of women in their families, but “Arden had to communicate her position through her salons” (48). As Arden advised women to pursue beauty as an aid to their familial, charitable, and career responsibilities, the Arden brand attained national and international prominence, obscuring modest beginnings.
Arden was born Florence Nightingale Graham in rural Ontario, Canada. After leaving factory labor and dropping out of nursing school, Graham sold homemade skin creams. Moving to New York City in 1908, Graham worked for cosmetics entrepreneur Eleanor Adair and subsequently opened a salon with Elizabeth A. Hubbard. With the 1910 split of this partnership, Graham adopted the persona of Elizabeth Arden. Cordery provides compelling analysis of newspaper and magazine advertisements that Arden then created. Positioning herself as an elite expert speaking directly to women, Arden savvily swayed consumers to reimagine cosmetics as respectable.
Cordery’s fascinating account of Arden’s friendship with Elisabeth Marbury, an influential theatrical agent and Democratic Party contributor, documents Arden’s expanding influence in high society and in charitable networks. Arden purchased Marbury’s Maine estate, revising Marbury’s vision of a retreat for laborers and opening a luxurious spa in 1934. An additional spa in Arizona and the development of clothing design as a feature in Arden salons solidified the Arden experience as an elite cultural touchstone. Reflecting this unique status, Cordery analyzes critical media reactions to the patronage of Mamie Eisenhower, First Lady of the United States in the 1950s.
To study Arden’s thinking, Cordery draws substantially from profiles and interviews featured in prominent periodicals, including The New Yorker (1935), Fortune (1938), and The Saturday Evening Post (1948). Cordery identifies these sources as evidence about earlier events mentioned retrospectively in the magazine pieces. Becoming Elizabeth Arden also cites popular biographies that incorporated observations by Arden associates, including Alfred Allan Lewis and Constance Woodworth, Miss Elizabeth Ardern (1972), and Lindy Woodhead, War Paint (2003). Researchers could benefit from additional commentary by Cordery on the methodology for interpreting these sources, in the absence of other firsthand accounts, as reliable indicators of Arden’s internal motivations. Deeper analysis of media interviews as part of Arden’s publicity strategies could further illuminate Arden’s career.
Cordery explores the Arden brand’s exclusivity but ultimately finds that a “passionate conviction that every woman deserves to be beautiful” was a core motivation for Arden (394). Additional analysis of Black women’s experiences would emphasize the powerful limits to such messages of empowerment. As historical context, Cordery briefly summarizes the innovative careers of early twentieth-century Black entrepreneurs Annie Turnbo Malone and Madam C. J. Walker, remarking that they “broke stereotypes and established lasting legacies, including a business model that many others—Black and white—would follow” (28). Cordery notes that Arden marginalized Black women, not envisioning them as consumers for her brand. Arden appears not to have included Black journalists at the company’s “Fashion Press Week” event until the 1960s, when “Black activism forced retailers like Elizabeth Arden to pay attention” (383). Recent scholarship on Black women’s beauty industry entrepreneurship in the longer term of the 1920s through 1960s could have supported additional analysis of these important dynamics. In Beauty Shop Politics (2010), historian Tiffany M. Gill analyzes Black women’s innovative entrepreneurship as beauty shop operators, considering the spaces as a platform for community responses to racism and sexism in the beauty industry and in society. Scholars including Blain Roberts (Pageants, Parlors, and Pretty Women [2016]) and Cheryl Thompson (Beauty in a Box [2019]) have analyzed the complexities of beauty product consumption by Black women, including their reactions to products marketed by white entrepreneurs. Applying these scholars’ models, Black periodicals and oral histories of Black women in the beauty industry would have provided useful additional evidence of the long-term effects of Arden’s company.
Although Elizabeth Arden’s career was unique, scholars of numerous aspects of the beauty industry and of marketing history can benefit from Cordery’s detailed documentation of Arden’s activities. Arden’s business innovations prefigured many industry patterns, and researchers of retail history will find important information in Cordery’s text. Becoming Elizabeth Arden provides fascinating examples reflecting both Arden’s power and the role of consumption in twentieth-century American culture.
