Examines nineteenth-century hairstyles and their cultural associations, and analyzes the social and symbolic roles that hair played in literary representations of the new body ideal of the era in fashion magazines, and as clues to social status, sexual availability and character in the fiction of major French authors including Baudelaire, Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola.

EBONY is the flagship magazine of Johnson Publishing. Founded in 1945 by John H. Johnson, it still maintains the highest global circulation of any African American-focused magazine.