12 FASHION 13

inoculated from smallpox in 1774, the mar- Iron-collared and corseted chandes de modes commemorated the event with the pouf à l’inoculation, a headdress representing a rising sun and the serpent of Asclepius. Hats adorned with miniature ships here’s nothing natural about clothes. MIKA ROSS-SOUTHALL whole torso to just below the waist, or not: one their weight (those still in existence each celebrated French naval victories, as well as Some people like to think that what they of Bruna’s rich examples comes from the Par- weigh between 800 grams and a kilo). Some showcasing the wearer’s patriotism and polit- Twear is free from artifice. But it never is. Denis Bruna, editor son in The Canterbury Tales, who denounces of the sharp ridges still have traces of velvet ical engagement. was a way of telling Clothes shape, reshape, highlight, squeeze, the shortness of men’s doublets that “show the edging. (Just imagine the pain when caught on others which plays, composers and ideas you FASHIONING THE BODY falsify, constrain our bodies; they signal ideals An intimate history of the silhouette boss and the shape of the horrible swollen mem- skin!) No visual evidence survives of their liked. If it hadn’t been for fashion, the Enlight- of beauty, social etiquette or morality. Those 272pp. Yale University Press. £35 (US $50). bers that seem like to the malady of hernia . . . being worn, but it seems likely that some were. enmentmightnothavespreadthroughEurope, shoulder pads, little plastic stiffeners in shirt 978 0 300 20427 8 and eke the buttocks that fare as it were the What we do have are written records: Eleonora Chrisman-Campbell suggests. collars, push-up bras and contouring under- hinder part of a she-ape in the full of the moon”. of Toledo ordered two from her family’s Marie-Antoinette, however, had an inappro- wear in our wardrobes today are the successors Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell An exquisite frontispiece from an illuminated armourer in 1549. The authors perhaps don’t priate interest in clothes. Her decision to use of starched neck ruffs, padded , hoop Bible given to King Charles V of France by his make it clear enough, however, that another Paris’s most fashionable marchandes de , and stomach belts – struc- FASHION VICTIMS adviser, Jean de Vaudetar, in 1372, is repro- of their examples, the “marquise-marquis de modes to her, rather than those officially Dress at the Court of Louis XVI and turing mechanisms, that work on our body’s duced here, showing the King on the left sitting Banneville”, is a fictional one, from the tale appointed at Versailles, deviated from court Marie-Antoinette silhouette to bring it into line with what we 352pp. Yale University Press. £35 (US $60). in an outdated and de Vaudetar kneeling ascribed to the Abbé de Choisy (1695): a protocol. She spent 258,002 livres on clothes think we ought to look like. 978 0 300 15438 2 on the right in a that strikingly contorts mother, fearing her son will be lost in battle, and accessories in 1785 (more than twice her How and why fashionable, often irrational, his body: a swollen chest and tiny waist, like a puts him in a metal to reshape his body, annual budget). A third of this went to her concepts of what we should wear and what is greyhound. Still, these male and female creating feminine hips and a bust. favourite marchande, Rose Bertin, whose and is not beautiful are questions that Fashion- as much from the increase in written and picto- silhouettes have both played a decisive role in The surgeon Ambroise Paré, in 1575, rec- career was made (and with time, destroyed) ing the Body, a collection of essays published rial evidence as from any genuine change. Western fashion. ommended iron for “flaccid” girls by the royal association: “wildly rich without in conjunction with an exhibition in New York These materials suggest that from the four- Shoulders were further broadened in the fif- who had hunchbacks. To Bruna and Vesin, being even remotely wellborn, Bertin was a earlier this year, attempts to answer. Under- teenth century a new awareness of clothing, as teenth century, as men added a cylindrical roll fashion and orthopaedics are not always in walking threat to the entire social order”. Any- garments, or “scaffolds”, and how they con- a way to sculpt the body, developed. Where around the armholes to which ballooning opposition: “orthopedics, which are today thing Marie-Antoinette wore would quickly struct a body’s silhouette, are the focus here. both men and women, Bruna shows, had worn fabric was attached. But by the sixteenth exclusively a branch of medicine, were princi- appear in fashion plates and magazines as “à la “When these articles are removed from the a voluminous garment like a monastic habit – century, they were no longer the star attraction. pally a social art in former times. Holding reine” and be copied by the public. Without person wearing them, they look like carcasses, the surcoat – women now dressed in a long robe The doublet was modified to become the peas- oneself erect, and staying that way, was a pre- sumptuary laws, luxury was suddenly within like bodies foreign to the body they dressed”, (the bliaut) often with a low neckline (some- cod, or goose-bellied doublet, which was pad- occupation of the upper classes, and iron cor- reach for anyone. In the 1780s, for example, the Denis Bruna writes in his introduction. “With- times provocatively bare down to the nipples), ded to a point at the waist like a breastplate, sets furthered this aim”. The preoccupation Queen’s preference for imported muslins and out a body, the garment has no reason to exist; fitted tightly at the waist with laces tied at the while more padding swelled with supports persists over centuries. We repeatedly come gauzes over the silks produced in Lyon helped it is merely a lifeless mass of fabric, a soulless front or back to support, compress and lift the around the abdomen, sculpting a hanging across in this book that offer put France’s textile industry out of business. hide.” Several pages of abstract, close-up pho- breasts and exaggerate the hips. Although the paunch. This all centred on the , and the body “support”, help with “fat-busting”, This was part of her move towards a more natu- tographs of, for instance, beehive-shaped wire binding of breasts was nothing new (women in Bruna dedicates an entire chapter to it. Besides toning, moisturizing and so on. A French ral aesthetic and to fend off critics of her extrav- frames and rattan hoops suspended on white or ancient Rome wore bands of fabric called being a functional opening at the crotch – poster from the 1950s promotes stomach agance, but the catastrophic economic impact black backgrounds prove Bruna’s point: pic- mamillare), this impulse was noticeably docu- indeed, earlier codpieces were a piece of cloth bands for toddlers for their “delicate frame”, a of her à la reine – a plain, white muslin tured in isolation these shapes have little mented in the medieval period. Men, mean- partly attached with buttons or eyelets at the custom that was standard between the seven- with a gathered neckline and , a meaning. “In short, fashion makes the body”, while, wore doublets – so called because the groin – these pouches were stuffed or layered teenth and nineteenth centuries when girls and wide sash tied at the waist and no hoop under he says: “there is no natural body, only a cul- garment was made from doubled-up material, with stiff fabric to highlight and stimulate the boys wore the same clothes as adults, includ- the – meant that she was never more criti- tural body. The body is a reflection of the between which cotton padding or silk cocoon penis. Puffed up, or trying to puff themselves ing corsets and . Only after the age of six cized for her wardrobe. With the throne’s repu- society that presided over its creation”. scraps were stitched – at first as cushioning up, with rank and virility, men of all social did boys abandon severe body-binding under- tation at stake, Bertin and the Queen’s It is not uncommon to read that fashion underneath armour, and then as a way of classes adopted this new-fangled appendage. garments to wear pants or like men. portraitist, Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, was invented in the , Bruna writes, enhancing the chest and broadening the shoul- Giovanni Battista Moroni’s entertaining por- Anti-obesity belts became a popular way for were called on to perform “sartorial damage though he warns that this consensus may stem ders under everyday clothing, covering the trait of Antonio Navagero (1565), for exam- men in the 1900s to compress their flab – a control”. The result, a portrait, here given a full ple, depicts the Venetian bureaucrat with a symbol of softness and indulgence not page, shows Marie-Antoinette posing in a - bulging red-velvet codpiece protruding from admired as it was in the previous century. An ably regal red velvet dress, trimmed with sable his fur-lined robe, like his shiny, ruddy nose advert from 1928 proclaims: “Obesity makes andAlençonlace(apointedendorsementofthe poking out from his beard above. As Philip you ridiculous. Big-bellied men, give up the French lace industry), surrounded by her child- Stubbes pointed out in his pamphlet The Anat- figure that makes you ugly and start wearing ren. It was exhibited at the Salon in August omie of Abuses (1583), men were “so stuffed, the Franck-Braun belt”. The second half of An American corset, c.1865; from Fashioning the Body 1787, and almost immediately withdrawn wadded, and sewn that they can’t even bend the twentieth century gave us Issey Miyake’s because of a public outcry. The empty frame down to the ground”. plastic-moulded bustiers, and plaster corsets one on of the other to such an extent that 36 inches high from the roots, and with so remained on the wall of the Louvre with a note Women fared little better. In the sixteenth by Alexander McQueen, as well as a skin-tight you could put two fingers into the hollow many feathers and ribbons that it rises even pinned to it reading, “Behold the Deficit!” century, beauty among the elite was concen- brown leather corset, with large diagonal created down the spine. The had higher! . . . A pretty young queen, full of attrac- In some ways, France never escaped the trated around the face. Women’s figures were stitches across the chest and abdomen as if developed into ever-widening panniers that tions, has no need of all these follies”. potency of fashion. Looking beyond the sans- elongated, flared and padded at the hips with closing up a wound. extended sideways from the hips. Walking What Chrisman-Campbell does so well in , Chrisman-Campbell argues that the the help of (a series of connected Certainly, hindering the body’s movement with ease was a skill you had to learn. Before this book is to explain how a new global fash- red, white and blue cockade became a symbol hoops made from whalebone, rattan, reeds or was deliberate in the seventeenth and eigh- shewasseven,theComtessedeGenlisremem- ion system, established in France during the of enforced conformity to the principles of the cord under the skirt) to hide the “carnal” parts teenth centuries. It was a way of showing off bered: “I was quite surprised when I was told eighteenth century, became political. “The French Revolution. By 1792, it was mandatory of the body, and the head, the “noble” part of one’s wealth: the less you could do physically, that I was to be given a master to teach me what sartorial restlessness . . . was symptomatic of – for both sexes, even foreign visitors to France, the body, was emphasized at the top with a the more servants you needed to do things for I thought I knew perfectly well – how to walk and, ultimately, responsible for – the gradual, to wear it. “Absolute monarchy was replaced high, stand-up collar. Later, in the seventeenth you. breeches, laden with ribbons . . . and to rid me of my provincial airs, I was inexorableunravelingofFrance’ssocialfabric by an equally despotic form of mob rule.” The century, the same effect was achieved with a and lace, worn by men at the court of Louis given an iron collar”. It was also fashionable to that would culminate in revolution.” Three Revolution had transformed “la mode” to “le stiff white (“the platter upon which XIV were described by Molière as “folly” in wear shoe buckles so enormous that they could archetypes provoked and personified the mode”, she says, acknowledging that the head was served”, Bruna tells us), also L’École des maris: “large rolls wherin the legs deliver glancing blows to the opposite ankle as country’s changes: the queen; the petite-maît- in dress were inseparable from fashions in worn by men and children. are put every morning, as it were into the you walked. And, of course, to wear wigs: dur- resse, a label given to urban women lower ideas. One of the most shocking items from this stocks”, making the wearer “straddle about ing the reign of Louis XVI – a significant down the social scale, who were occupied in The history of the Revolution is dynami- time, though, is the iron corset. A fascinating with their legs as wide apart as if they were the moment in European fashion history, keeping up with the latest fads despite how cally told in Fashion Victims, and where chapter by Bruna and Sophie Vesin focuses on beams of a mill”. Added to this were silk stock- according to Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell’s unflattering, expensive or frivolous they were; Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell tries to gauge the ten or so that survive in various museum ings to slim the legs (calves were sometimes absorbing and well-illustrated survey, Fash- and the marchande de modes, similar to what the cultural significance of clothes, art, per- collections: “more closely related to metal- subtly padded with material to amplify lacking ion Victims – some men wore wigs fitted with we would now call a designer, who perpetu- sonal memoirs and other assorted and well- work than textiles” and “at times compared to muscles) and precarious heels (also worn by metal, face-lifting armatures to stretch out ated the fashion cycle by relentlessly introduc- chosen sources, she avoids jargon. The book is instruments of torture”, they are the oldest women), often up to three or four inches high, wrinkles on the forehead, while women stiff- ing new garment constructions. thoroughly researched (the translations from versions of a corset, some of which have been altering one’s gait. ened and enhanced the height of their own hair An influential individual could single- the French texts are her own) and inflected dated to the sixteenth and seventeenth centu- A few decades on in Versailles, whalebone with pomade and false attachments. In a letter handedly garner support for current causes, with energy. Marie-Antoinette is condemned, ries; they open and close with hinges, and are corsets, known as stays, unforgivingly of March 5, 1775, Marie-Antoinette’s mother and sustain or bankrupt whole branches of the again; but we can see more clearly than ever pierced, not just for decoration but to reduce squeezed women’s shoulder blades together chastised her daughter: “They say your hair is country’s commerce. When Louis XVI was why it happened.

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