Fashion Plate
Lacing Into Lingerie of Old
By Angela
Murrills
Step into Unmentionables, the exhibit opening next Thursday (June 26)
at the Vancouver Museum, and you will kiss the ground for how blessed
you are. Perhaps not if you're a man (male underwear hasn't changed that
much over the centuries), but if you're a woman, you will rightly
stare in horror at what greets you. Dating back to 1720, and the
oldest piece in the exhibit, is a set of blue silk-damask-covered
stays from Munich. Nearby is an example of "jumps", the
term for a "casual" corset, this one made of embroidered
ecru linen in the 1760s or 1770s, and probably English, says fashion
historian Ivan Sayers. A couple of deductions: corsetry spanned
national boundaries, and decades, in a single whaleboned leap.
It's a giant jump in time, fabric, and mores to a lingerie item
borrowed from the Nanaimo Museum: a blowup bra, complete with
inflating straw, dating back to the 1950s. "That's one of the
eccentric things none of us had here [in Vancouver]," says
Sayers, who, aided by fellow collectors Claus Jahnke and Melanie
Talkington, has contributed innumerable unmentionables and extensive
experience. What was in the Vancouver Museum's collection and flaunts
itself amid the array of foundation garments, hoops, and bustles is a
red satin corset, made in 1898, that was part of a wedding from
Nelson.
Centuries ago, being born female meant that unless you were a
lowly peasant, yours would be a life of constriction. The gap between
diapers and corsets was a brief one. "Children were wearing
corsets from the age of three," says Sayers. (The exhibit
includes an example from the 1780s.) "By school age, little
girls were expected to wear some kind of foundation garment. It was
the objectification of women," he explains. "A girl had to
have a good figure to find a husband," to which end, she even
wore corsets to bed.
How small was the perfect waist? Asking that very question of a
magazine of the day, a young woman in the 1860s learned that because
she was so extremely tall (five foot six) she could add one inch to
her 16 years. As an indication of what that means, Sayers points to
his own neck, which measures a half-inch more. In fact, reports of
unnaturally tiny waistlines may be exaggerated, he says: "Of all
the dresses I've ever seen or examined, maybe four dresses had
proportions like that."
In the great cavalcade of sartorial history, the widespread
donning of underwear is a fairly modern invention. "Men only
started to wear underwear as we understand it from the mid-19th century,"
says Sayers. One of the little-heralded side benefits of the
industrial revolution was a rising middle class that wanted to ape
its betters in everything, including the adoption of underclothes.
These had to be white because whiteness (associated with purity and
cleanliness) further helped discriminate the pristine bourgeoisie
from the grubby working classes, and that meant using bleach, which
couldn't be used on colours.
By 1810, women were wearing pantalets, but these were seen more as
a novelty. "It was considered very vulgar to wear any kind of
trousers, anything that divided the legs." The cancan was so
offensive because the dancers' underwear was basically two legs
attached to a waistband. These early, essentially crotchless styles answer
one of the most common questions Sayers says he is asked on the
lecture circuit: "How did they go to the bathroom?" The
exhibit responds to the other--"Who invented the
bra?"--with an entire section detailing its evolution, launching
off with an early model designed to display an Edwardian bust as a
matronly mono-bosom. By the 1920s, women, keen to appear lissome and
boylike, wore flattening bandeaux, fabric bands six inches deep that
were held up by ribbon straps; over time, the garment acquired a
vertical drawstring between the breasts. Around the early 1930s,
darts were introduced for shape and comfort, and by 1939 bras were
available in different cup sizes, essential equipment for wartime
"sweater girls".
There was one last hurrah from the concentrically quilted
missile-cone bras of the 1950s and then, soon after, everything fell
flat.
Unmentionables' time line concludes at the end of the 1960s with a
psychedelic girdle, just before lingerie became not unmentionable so
much as temporarily absent.
Displayed chronologically, Unmentionables is a fascinating and
erudite look at the sometimes provocative, often uncomfortable,
always intriguing underlayers worn by our ancestors. Among the most
stunningly beautiful pieces on show is a 1904 corset from Claus Jahnke's
collection. Made of rose-printed grey silk with strips of
ivory-coloured silk satin, and edged with black and white ruffles, it
belonged to a German countess. Among the quirkiest examples (note
that the exhibit spans gender as well as history) are men's Danish
hipster-style briefs in a red Lycra-like fabric, unworn and still
packaged as they were sold, in the shape of a tulip. But for the
truly unmentionable, check out a little item made, Sayers thinks, in
the early 1950s: Polish-made Y-fronts of transparent pink nylon.
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