For information on historical beauty standards, you might want to check out my previous answers:
This is one of those questions where I have to step back and take issue with the premise, because where beauty standards come from is incredibly complicated. From the outside, yes, it looks as though the industry produces something and consumers, well, passively consume what they're sold - but consider that the industry wants money above all else, and that it has to bend to what the audience wants. Both the consumers and the producers are influenced by wider trends in society: movies and artwork that strike a chord with the public and either inspire them to create or purchase something that looks like what they see, for instance. At the same time, what strikes a chord with the public is often related to something already present in the standards of beauty of the day. There is a constant stream of push/pull in the boundaries that gradually shifts the center (the mainstream) in one direction or another.
Two centuries ago is actually a perfect time period to discuss this, both because there was actually quite a radical shift in beauty standards around that time that drew on sources outside of the fashion/beauty industry itself. Going a little farther back to the 1770s, there was a significant amount of interest in making furniture with inspiration from ancient Greek and Roman decorative arts and statuary, spurred by archaeological excavations in Pompeii and Herculaneum. This chair at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is an excellent example: the legs are fluted like columns, and the frame is carved as though those columns had capitals above them and a frieze between them - the legs and seat basically form a tiny Greek temple. (This was comparatively stripped down compared to florid Rococo-style furniture of previous decades.) Artists also were painting original compositions based on classical stories - Jacques Louis David is particularly famous for this. At the same time, Jean-Jacques Rousseau's theories about humanity being better when closer to a state of nature, published in various works in the 1760s and 1770s, implied that less ornamentation and artifice in dress, cosmetics, furniture design, landscaping, etc. would be objectively and inherently better than more; a further logical step was that activities and settings closer to nature would be better than those that were more artificial or related to "society". Yet another brick in this wall is the change that was taking place in the understanding of the family itself at the time - family portraiture shows that showing more sentiment and a more relaxed ("natural") attitude between family members was becoming more common, and mothers specifically were coming to take a more active role in their young children's lives, including breastfeeding themselves rather than using a wet nurse, all usually posed as a more "natural" form of parenting.
(There is definitely more to be said here in detail, and if someone with deeper knowledge of late eighteenth century social history were to flesh it out I would not be offended. But you can see: simplicity and natural-ness are the watchwords.)
The first hints of all this affecting dress started in the mid-to-late 1770s, when informal clothing became more fashionable. For men, this typically meant frock coats with turn-down collars and lapels, previously worn for hunting or other outdoor country pursuits, and suits made in duller colors with much less ornamentation. For women, it meant clothing like the polonaise, a looser gown with an effectively shorter skirt, and jackets. Soon, things got even more relaxed with the chemise gown, an unfitted white muslin dress held in with drawstrings and a sash; while white was hardly unused before then, its popularity rose sharply during this time even outside the chemise gown, in part because of the classical associations - they didn't know that Greek statues were originally painted - as well as the simplicity of the color. Waistlines rose during the next decade and continued to rise until about 1795, particularly in the unfitted chemise gowns (which became essentially the only type of gown by 1800): a higher waistline helped the wearer to look more like Hellenistic statues. Other simplifications that went on over the course of this whole period include below-the-gown foundations going from wide hoop skirts to a simple pad in the back; hairstyles for both men and women were also involved, with women's hair losing these intricate curls and braids, not to mention height, in favor of general frizz and some hanging curls, and eventually upswept and a little unkempt curls, and men switching from queues and side-curls to a relaxed look, and eventually the tousled Titus cut. Hair powder was completely out of fashion by the end of the century.
Over the course of a couple of decades, standards of beauty had changed dramatically - from Rococo artifice to Neoclassical simplicity - based on a complex web of changing tastes in philosophy, art, interior design, and family life. And tastes continue to change for complex reasons: they're just harder to tease out right now because we don't have the perspective to see the broader trends.
(If I've misunderstood the thrust of your question, /u/goldenspider666, please let me know and I'll try to answer it better.)