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The Changing Female Form
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12217 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
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2 / 1987 |
2,645 Words |
| Author
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Judy Wade
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If one is to believe the perception of artists and photographers over the ages, the shape of women has undergone drastic changes. The Rubenesque chubbies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries bear little resemblance to the boy-like "garconnettes" of the Roaring Twenties. The Gay Nineties hourglass figure is nothing like the well-toned athletic woman's body much admired today.
The chronicle of how the female form has been corseted, confined, and constricted over the centuries traces a history of emphasis and exaggeration that sometimes resulted in illness and even death, all in the name of fashion. So great was the influence of rigid undergarments on the look of an era, that today motion picture and television wardrobe technicians must replicate them. In a period drama, because the shape of the outer garment relies on the foundation, the correct undergarment or corset will help the wearer to move authentically "in period." A young actress cast in the television production Eleanor and Franklin declared that during shooting, between takes, the score of actresses in a ballroom scene rushed to entreat any available person to loosen their stays for a few minutes' respite from the torture of their corsets.
Constrictive garments existed as early as the eighteenth century B.C. A status of the Serpent Goddess from the Minoan civilization on the island of Crete shows her wearing a corset that made her skirt lie flat on her hips and accentuated the slimness of her waist and the prominence of her bare breasts. Something quite close to the bandeau bras of today are shown on young women in a mosaic from the Piazza Armerini villa in Sicily, dating to the third or fourth century A.D. It's not clear whether these were just body coverings, or whether the bra-like garment had a more uplifting purpose.
Through the first ten or eleven centuries of the Christian era, clothing was generally utilitarian, providing protection against heat and cold. Although a sense of fashion was evolving, little was done to alter the basic form of the body. Then, in thirteenth-century France and Italy, visual arts and literature gave greater importance to the perfection of the female body, laying the groundwork for the restraining undergarments to come.
By the fifteenth century, protuberant stomachs were the style, as shown in many paintings of the era, such as Jan van Eyck's "Jan Arnolfini and His Wife," and "Nuremberg Lady in Sunday Dress" by Albrecht Durer. This look was achieved with small bags of padding under the woman's dress, which had an artificial waistline tied just under her breasts. The upper part of the body was uncomfortably tight-fitted to show the outline of the bust.
Around 1470 one of the most extreme exaggerations of the female form first appeared. When Queen Juana of Portugal found herself pregnant with a child that could not have been sired by her invalid husband, Enrique V, she devised a system of rigid hoops to support her skirt so as to disguise her condition. This style became the vertugade in France and the farthingale in England, and eventually spread through all of Europe. A 1595 Dutch engraving satirizing the farthingale shows women being fitted with an inner-tube-like roll that rested on their hips to emphasize the slimness of the waist, which was confined in a high-boned bodice. The accompanying poem reads:
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