genuinely, we should bring back bumppads and other bits of padding to get a fun fashion silhouette in our clothing. Forget all this stuff about “flattering your natural body type” or “getting the perfect body” or whatever. Let’s just put some fake ass and thighs into the skirt and call it a day.
I mean, this is the thing. For a large chunk of human history, nobody thought your actual human body was supposed to be shaped like the currently fashionable silhouette.
Like, a given person’s ability to meet the standards of fashion was very much tied to wealth and class, but the standard was “be able to strap on the various foundation garments required to fill out the dress, which is ideally made from as much expensive fabric as you can possibly afford.”
A lot of people today talk about stays and corsets as instruments of torture, but they don’t seem to notice that we absolutely do still have a fashionable silhouette that changes cyclically. It’s just that now, if the clothes don’t fit you right, the problem is not your lack of crinoline/bum roll/sleeve supports/bustle/bust improver/whatever — it’s just you. Your body is the thing you’re supposed to change.
And, frankly: fuck that.
Is there any explanation as to *why* it changed from “Clothing is meant to change your silhouette” to “Your body is meant to change”?
I’m sure nonasuch has an actual answer but to my knowledge the major shift away happened post ww1 in the 20’s and then the expense of fabric during the depression really cemented things in that direction
It was actually later, in the late 60s/early 70s. 20s silhouettes still relied on careful cutting and structured underpinnings to create the shape, and most women’s clothing was still very tailored and supported by girdles through the 40s, 50s, and 60s.
The big thing was the advent of stretch fabrics, and overlocker sewing machines. Once you can make clothes that kind of fit with simple shapes and zero tailoring, the labor needed to make them doesn’t have to be nearly as skilled and the cost of production plummets. But those clothes also can’t achieve the architectural shapes of earlier eras, and don’t need the understructure those heavily tailored clothes needed.
The marketing for new (synthetic) stretch fabrics leaned heavily on how modern they were, and they were hitting the market in tandem with major social upheaval and the offshoring of the American garment industry. All of these things influenced each other — there was no grand conspiracy to make women feel bad about their bodies.
There was a social milieu happening that made it easy to view girdles and the New Look silhouette as old-fashioned and repressive, and equate modern styles, made in modern stretch fabrics, with liberation. And then the fashion industry and the beauty industry had to figure out how to sell women new things, because they weren’t wearing the old things any more, and what they landed on was what got us to where we are now.
so, tldr? polyester ruined everything.
I mean it is also the case that we didn’t look directly AT bodies till the 30s, when we had bias cut satin, and movie stars, and photos of women in bathing suits weren’t illicit. As you wear less clothing, the clothing can do less work on your behalf, and your body comes under scrutiny directly.
Let’s not blame sweatpants alone for what can be accurately attributed to the accretion of exclusionary competition over time. The 1800s saw several body-type trends, but they were things like having light skin, or tiny feet – the body parts people were able to look at. Long before the invention of modern marketing, the rich and powerful were finding ways to define themselves against hoi polloi, using their bodies when their clothes and habits couldn’t do the trick. It just got faster in the 20th century, and became predominantly bodies because, well, among many other reasons when you buy a dress you’ve bought a dress, but when you try to buy a body you have to keep paying installments forever. Marketers love that.
(It is charming to go through 70s sewing patterns and watch them teach their audience how to sew with knits. The Pick-a-knit ruler on the side of the package! Sometimes it’ll say in bold, NOT SUITABLE FOR WOVENS. And you know what the first body-mod innovation I see in patterns from that era? The waist measure in sizing goes up by two inches, because people aren’t wearing girdles any more.)
all very true! I was oversimplifying a process that drastically sped up in the late 60s, but it’s roots start much earlier.
And just to reiterate a point made above: because clothing is costume, the status associated with it is generally the most expensive/difficult part of it. When fabric production was one of the most labor intensive tasks (food, fabric, metal, military), the status symbol was wearing as much, and as fine, of it as possible. The Roman toga is up to 20 feet of blindingly white linen because that is (a) a lot of fabric and (b) a lot of work to keep it white. (ditto white dress shirts). Women wore lots of petticoats because, again, as much fabric as you could get away with. (Nonasuch, the the bussell become a thing because it was a way to pretend you had more fabric than you really did?)
And then the industrial revolution happened, and fabric costs plunged from “one of the all-consuming human activities” to “people in Africa can clothe themselves with discarded shirts made for the team who didn’t win the superbowl”.
Fabric is still costly. Making yourself a gorgeous ballgown is going to be a few thousand dollars of fabric and labor (counting your own, if you sew it yourself). A thousand dollars is a lot! It is three weeks of labor at US minimum wage. So probably a few months of savings if it is carefully budgeted for.
But think about that. At minimum wage, it is still possible to make yourself an outfit that would have purely been affordable to the gentry and upper middle class. In P&P, the Bennetts can afford dresses, but they are still a substantial drain on the family’s resources. And those were regency and far less nice than some of the Dickens’ Faire outfits. And if you are rich, then even super nice outfits have to be Branded to be a status symbol.
So what do you do to differentiate yourself of “lots of fabric” just isn’t a problem?
Make it about weight, which is notoriously difficult to deal with.
And additionally, I don’t think we can ignore that there was also a good deal of pushback against understructures and formal clothing norms. A lot of that was countercultural, but it bled over into mainstream culture and slowly, younger people did find going without a girdle more comfortable and overall societal standards shifted (though unfortunately not to include going braless…one can dream)
Another major social change to note is the shift from fashion being the realm of the mature adult, to youth culture defining fashion. It seems logical to me that when a 30-40 year old woman is the pinnacle of fashion, it’s going to be more acceptable to pad and structure, but when literal teenagers are the standard, well—teenagers don’t tend to sag as much as the rest of us. I remember one comment on a vintage clothing youtube channel of an older lady who remembered being really excited to grow up and be able to wear the classy stuff her mom was wearing, but by the time she was a teenager, fashion had shifted so that youth clothing was all the rage and she never did get to wear the kind of ‘classy’ clothing that was previously the mark of the mature woman and also fashionable.
People also generally stopped wearing the same amount of clothing. People don’t wear hats, gloves, hose, heels, and pearls before going out, and that was a norm into the 70s and even later in many places.
Also? Pants. Or trousers if you prefer. They’re a complicated kind of garment, now worn ubiquitously. It’s way easier to fluff out a skirt than it is to pad out close-fitting pants that shift with your body as you walk (potentially revealing any padding, and it’s generally been gauche to let your shapewear show, even when said shapewear was ridiculously artificial), and it’s way easier to add a bumroll to a skirt that’s not form-hugging.
That being said, formal wear does retain elements of structure—many formal dresses have boned bodices and padded busts and blazers are enhanced with shoulder pads. We haven’t left it behind entirely, either. On the one hand, I remember stuffing one’s bra to be a concept common in at least books when I was in middle school. For adults, various push-up and padded bras are still a thing, and wedding dresses usually retain corsets and petticoats as needed.
I would argue that there was an attitude change and I think it had to have happened a lot later than people acknowledge. “Fakery” in some form has been mocked for centuries for people who enhance their features to the point that enhancements are visible, but somewhere in the past handful of decades, mainstream US culture accepted that adding is fake/bad, but subtracting or re-shaping is normal. Boned bodices and spanx are fine, but padding bras beyond what a push-up bra will do is fake. (you do see this in attitudes towards plastic surgery a little, where liposuction is eh but breast implants are O.o ) There’s probably something to be said for the interaction of health culture combined with the growing awareness that many things for “health” are not as good as advertised (e.g. smoking)
There’s probably also something to be said for the demise of at-home sewing as a common pursuit, though that’s been in a long, slow decline. Structured things are complicated to make and require a lot of know-how, and being able to tailor your clothes is not a commonly taught skill.
I do have to say, though, the shift from the expectation of structure to loose-and-free is vividly illustrated by an episode of Star Trek, originally aired October 20, 1966:
[ID: An image of Kirk and Nurse Chapel, who wears a wearing a cowl-necked dress with clear understructure. Her silhouette is almost angular, with a clear hourglass waist and lifted bust, reminiscent of a classic 1950s silhouette, but the cowl-neck of her dress and her bouffant hairstyle mark the outfit as a little later. End ID]
[ID: the same characters shown from a different angle and lighting. End ID]
Then later in the episode, we’re shown this character, who is later revealed to be an android, and if not explicitly written then heavily implied to have been created for sexual gratification and created by Nurse Chapel’s lost fiance, who she is trying to reach.
[ID: an image of a younger woman with loose, shoulder length hair, not heavily set or styled. She wears a jumpsuit with a deep, wide v-neck made of two crisscrossing panels that leave the sides of the waist exposed. She is clearly not wearing shapewear (or any torso undergarments) underneath. End ID]
Stark contrast, huh? I think it’s interesting how not only can you see a woman (who is looking for a lost fiance) being contrasted with a younger woman or at least youthfully presented woman who has figuratively replaced her. It’s scifi, of course, and not a representation of what people are actually wearing, but it does give insight into the cultural imagination and expectations of its time.
reblogging for some really good additions!
i don’t disagree with any of this EXCEPT the assertion that men didn’t pad their trousers. there was definitely a time period where gentlemen wore very tightly fitted garments from ankle to hip to show off their athletic figure, because having enough money to spend all your time on horseback was extremely sexy– but we’ve got records that those men who weren’t so fortunate as to fill out their breeches nicely enough went and padded their calves, thighs, and butts.
men with a little too much up top to smooth away also got lampooned.
this is actually where we get the word ‘bombastic’ from. bombast was the term for the wool, horsehair, and sawdust used for padding out sleeves, doublets, and pantaloons. you can immediately guess why guys who were pretentiously full of themselves were called bombastic.
Look. Look. I think the hardest thing about your twenties is the shift from getting shoved towards new frontiers of maturity by, like, puberty and education and the logistics of gaining independence, to you having to shove yourself. It’s a mental recalibration from “you grow up whether you like it or not” to “you can and should keep evolving, but now you have to choose it. And you have to choose it a half-dozen times a day in increasingly annoying ways. And this sucks but the reward is that you get to be a person in the world.”
any australians in the crowd tonight, the national library’s fabulous online resource trove is losing funding next year and if nothing happens to change that it will likely cease to exist. trove is not only a valuable resource for historians like me, it is a national cultural archive that is of great importance to australian society today. it is also completely accessible and free of charge to anyone with the internet; how fucking rare is that! we can’t lose it. i can’t even imagine the consequences.
if you’re as emotional about this as i am, or even if you’re not but love pestering people in power for any reason whatsoever, please contact your local mp and ask them to save trove and commit to funding this invaluable resource beyond july 2023. you can find your local member here. please also contact susan templeman mp, the special envoy for the arts, and tony burke mp, the arts minister.
non-australians, i would really appreciate a reblog. funding needs to be secured for trove and it needs to happen now.
so I got into grad school today with my shitty 2.8 gpa and the moral of the story is reblog those good luck posts for the love of god
okay so i just got my dream job??? a week after applying to it?? and now i’m thinking….maybe this is the good luck post
…..not even six hours later i got an offer of a well paying full time long-term job with free room and board in queens in nyc, allowing me independence and a way to escape an abusive situation and an unhealthy environment
likes charge reblogs cast, folks, this is the good luck post
i need all the help i can get for finals
Hey so
the last time I reblogged this post right before I got a great job, in a permanent work-from-home position, with benefits, retirement, and a salary literally 3x what I was making before, doing something I really like.
