“100 Years of Beauty” Explores Hawaii
By Ani Bundel
Cut Video takes their 100 Years of Beauty series to another far flung corner of the US, exploring the decades of fashion from the Islands of Hawaii.
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You may not have heard of Cut Video, but you would probably recognize their viral hit video from 2014, “100 Years of Beauty in One Minute.” In it, they timelapsed a (white American) woman getting her hair and make up done according to the fashions of the times, starting in 1910 and going through to our decade today. It was such a viral hit, they followed it up with a second video, this time featuring an African American woman during the same time period. It too was a viral hit.
From there, a series was born. Over the last year, the 100 Years of Beauty timelapses have explored different cultures beauty standards, from Iran to the Koreas to Brazil to Kenya. (They’ve even done a couple for men.) More recently they return to the United States, with their last episode focusing on the territory of Puerto Rico. Their latest entry focuses on another US territory, the last one to make the conversion to statehood, and the birthplace of our current president.
Behold, Hawaii.
Unlike some of these videos, Hawaii doesn’t undergo a major shift during the 1910s-2010s. That shift, which was when the US backed an coup overthrowing the Hawaiian government to make way for their annexation, occurred only a decade and a half prior to the the World War I years. Hawaii officially becoming a holding of the US in 1899. Instead what we see here is a bit of the aftermath of that sudden instant Westernization. Note that the 1910s has her wearing pearl necklaces, which is a highly Westernized trope. From there we then shift away from the Western styles, and into something approximating native Hawaiian culture for the next thirty years. It’s been notable in prior videos how the Western styles took hold post WWI in many other cultures. The Roaring Twenties look seemed to travel globally. Here it’s nowhere to be seen–almost as if the American isolationist policies of the 20s and 30s allowed Hawaii to return to who they were before.
Post World War II we start to see the Western style returning. With Americans having more disposable income, vacations to Hawaii were popular (See, also Season 7 of Mad Men.) There’s a burst of nationalism in the 1970s, but Hawaiians don’t actually get an apology until the 1990s for what was done to them. Even so, the tug of war between the Native Hawaiians and the US government continues even today, with the 2010s showing the “We Are Mauna Kea” social media protests, demanding that the sacred summit of that dormant volcano not become home to a $1.4 billion project which includes an 18 story high telescope.
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The 100 Years of Beauty series never seems to run out of subjects. I can’t wait to see which country and culture they do next.