Anyone who has been imprisoned in a pair of suck-it-in knickers knows there is a point in the evening — usually around the pudding course – when your Spanx become an instrument of torture, rather than a piece of sisterly scaffolding. But modern “shapewear” has nothing on 17th-century lingerie, which would sometimes be made of metal to really keep a maiden’s curves in check.
An iron corset, giving the wearer a 21-inch waist, is one highlight of a new exhibition in York that charts how fashion, food and fitness have shaped the body over the past 400 years.
Shaping the Body, which opens at the York Castle Museum on 25 March, shows that Kim Kardashian was far from the first to popularise big bottoms. The Victorians also favoured a generous posterior, with bum rolls (no, really) incorporated into tailoring to create a silhouette of extreme curves. “There was even a store called ‘The Bum Shop’, where a lady could go to buy her padding,” says curator Ali Bodley.
Men were just as bad: the exhibition includes a pair of splendid embroidered stockings and various cheaty male garments: discrete trouser padding to make a scrawny calf more shapely; male corsets to create the exaggerated shoulder-to-waist triangular shape popular with the protein-obsessed gym bunnies of the 21st century.
Just as heroin chic was all the rage in the early 1990s, when Kate Moss led a new pack of emaciated, jagged-hipped waifs, back in the 1840s “TB chic” was the look all the sophisticated, young gals about town were aiming for: “very thin, very pale, but with flushed cheeks,” says Bodley. She says there’s nothing particularly novel about the so-called selfie generation, who will go to daft lengths to look good on Instagram: “The reality is that, even before the age of the digital camera, people would go to extremes to conform to fashion, whether through changing diet or [wearing] clothing that modified the body’s shape.”
On display in York alongside bum rolls and iron corsets are modern “chicken fillets” that flat-chested women today can shove down their Wonderbra, as well as crotchless pantaloons from Jane Austen’s time. Knickers weren’t really worn in the Regency period until debutantes started wearing gauzy and sometimes see-through dresses, which had a tendency to show a little too much in the wrong light. Thus the bloomer was born – although it wasn’t until quite a bit later that someone thought to put a crotch in ladies’ grundies. “For a while, the pantaloons featured a gap between the legs so that a woman in a full dress could go to the loo without having to lift all of her skirts,” says Bodley.
Her favourite exhibit is an “arsenic dress” made with fabric dyed using the killer chemical. “In the middle of the 19th century, arsenic was used as a dye in wallpaper and material,” she says. “People who made it often suffered from arsenic poisoning, developing open sores. Women who wore the dresses were OK unless they perspired, [when] the arsenic would seep into their blood.”
