It's Not Your Imagination. Beautiful Women All Look Alike Now
As pressures to meet unattainable beauty standards mount, is individuality being lost to conformity?
Before celebrity influencers like the Kardashians jet-setted to million-dollar birthday parties, accumulated wardrobes with 30,000 pieces of clothing, or simply lied about their net worth, the nineteenth-century’s most fabulously rich (almost always men) flashed their wealth by showing off their mistresses.
These mistresses were not common prostitutes but the most celebrated courtesans, otherwise known as Les Grandes Horizontales. Courtesans had one responsibility (when vertical) — to spend their lover’s money as extravagantly as possible.
These mistresses were always on display and the fodder for gossiping socialites. Opera boxes were even designed so that theatergoers could see both the actors on stage and the ostentatiously adorned mistresses watching the performances from above. Envy was the sport of the rich.
Often, it became a ludicrous competition on whose mistress could display the most conspicuous wealth.
In one apocryphal tale, the affluent banker Adolphe Gaiffe promised to pay any price to sleep with the famed courtesan La Païva. La Païva's settled on 20…
