“Beautiful and good things”: The Dress of Anaïs Nin 1931-1932

Anaïs Nin (1903-1977) was a twentieth-century author of fiction and a lifelong diary. In 1986, the first of a series of posthumously published unexpurgated diaries revealed Nin's romantic partnership with American author Henry Miller. This book is a reprinted doctoral dissertation which documented Nin's dress and appearance practices, as described in the original diaries, from 1931-1932. This study's findings included Nin's overall appearance, apparel, cosmetic surgery, Spanish dance costume, body image, and a love of luxury that existed within a bourgeois-bohemian tension. Nin loved silk stockings and French perfume, felt her self-esteem enhanced by Miller's admiration, and had an awareness of her appearance and its effects on herself and others. Although she spent many days and nights in Miller's apartment in Paris, she was never to give up her bourgeois life with her husband, Hugh P. Guiler. As Nin wrote, "Absolute luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful and good things are."