Beauty contests: looking at laws in Malaysia / Lucyia Gelangang and Nur Syafiqah Noorinda.

The history of Beauty Contests is generally accepted from the first modern beauty contest attempted by P. T. Barnum as a publicity stunt to attract audiences to his show in 1854. When he found that "respectable" women would not participate, he changed the format to a photographic competition with so much success that the idea was widely taken over by newspapers around the United States. By the close of the century, many newspapers sponsored such photographic beauty contests. In the 1920s, these contests began to be given a wider, more national character, to be used to attract tourists to specific resorts, and to feature the appearance of women in person and indeed in what was considered to be a highly questionable state of dress or undress, namely the bathing suit.