Reduce and Seduce at the Teenage Beauty Farm

When it opened in the Malibu mountains in 1962, the ‘Teen-Age Beauty Farm’ – a combination spa, charm school, weight-loss clinic, and summer camp – was billed as ‘the only place in the world dedicated to making the teen-ager more beautiful’. It attracted national news coverage for its innovative diet and fitness regime, which was simultaneously retrograde and decades ahead of its time. The very concept of a ‘teen-ager’ was newsworthy in 1962. While the word had been used since the 1930s, it typically applied only to the younger teenage years. But the postwar Baby Boom had created a ‘Youthquake’, as Vogue editor Diana Vreeland called it in 1965. By the mid-1960s roughly 40 per cent of Americans were under the age of 25. A vast ecosystem of teen-oriented magazines, fashion lines, beauty pageants, films, and bands sprang up to celebrate (and capitalise on) the new generation’s cultural and economic power.