In the late nineteenth century, high fashion dictated the maintenance of alabaster skin. Creamy white skin signified a person of privileged status, not an unfortunate sun-darkened field laborer. But as the industrial age dawned and laborers increasingly spent long hours in factories and the coal haze above city streets blocked the sun from reaching their tenement windows, the professional-managerial class, with its increased leisure time, embraced a culture of outdoor living. Furthermore, the consumer culture that emerged along with the products of the industrial age prompted a cultural shift toward an emphasis on appearance. Advertising, motion pictures, and the popular press inundated people with images of the body: images that emphasized the display of hedonism, leisure, and sexuality. A tan soon became a status symbol.

Fashion proved the greatest influence on the popularity of the suntan. Many learned about fashion through film; in the early 1920s Bela Bal...