The rad ladies of Berlei: part 3

Man, when I started this post I was only going to tell you about two rad ladies, but it seems that Arthur and Fred Burley employed lots of women in leadership roles that let them, if you will pardon another one of my trademark corny puns, shape Australian public life.


Clare Stevenson, by Nora Heysen, 1943.

Clare Stevenson was born in Wangaratta, Victoria and raised in Essendon. She studied science at the University of Melbourne but graduated in education in 1925, and when WWII broke out she was a senior executive at Berlei in charge of corporate training and product development, travelling between London and Sydney and around Australia.

"The interest in national fitness here amongst the older women will … help them keep the natural good posture and good looks of Australian youth till much later in life," Stevenson told the Perth Daily News in 1940, when she was visiting the city to deliver a very interesting-sounding lecture, 'The Care of the Bustline'.

Due to her management and training experience (and also, apparently, because she wasn't a "socialite"), Stevenson was appointed the Director of the Women's Auxiliary Australian Air Force (WAAAF) in 1940, rising to the rank of Group Officer (the equivalent to Group Captain in the regular air force, or to a captain in the Royal Navy or general in the British Army) in 1942.

The WAAAF was the first and the largest uniformed women's military service in Australia during WWII. By 1944 it had more than 18,000 members and made up roughly a third of the RAAF's ground force. A wonderful Sydney Morning Herald headline in 1941 marvelled, "Director of WAAAFs approves lipstick. Smokes, too."

"Women look more attractive with lipstick, even in uniform," she said, accepting the reporter's offer of a cigarette. "Lacquered nails? It's largely a matter of taste." Seriously, though, she spent the war fighting for equal pay and respect for her enlistees, and against the sentiment from government authorities that women's best contribution to the war effort was to maintain the home.

After the war, Stevenson returned to her previous job at Berlei. She retired in 1960. Never having married, she died in 1988, aged 85.

Desolie Richardson (who became Lady Desolie Hurley on her marriage to Sir John Garling Hurley in 1976) was Berlei's Chief Executive Designer from 1954 until her retirement in 1970. (Here's a photo of her in 1969.) During the 1950s she successfully licensed one of Berlei's flagship designs, the Sarong Girdle, from its American designer Constance Fridolph. (The correspondence between Richardson and Fridolph, thrashing out the details of this deal and sending sample garments back and forth, is now part of the Berlei Collection in the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney.)



The Sarong was advertised in the Australian Women's Weekly until the early 1980s. It featured two overlapping diagonal elastic panels in the front, which purportedly allowed more 'control' with greater freedom of movement. Early ads showed women dancing, walking a dog and playing golf in the garment. Another selling point was that it apparently didn't ride up.

As a side note, when I see historical ads posted online, in blogs or on Pinterest and Tumblr, I often see people taking the imagery quite literally. As I write in the book, advertising is an archive of desire: it says much more about how people wanted to live than how they actually lived. This is valuable, because it's a way of capturing ephemeral social attitudes.

You can tell what it might actually have been like to wear historical underwear by paying attention to what the ads say their products won't do, or that their competitors do badly. For instance, if an ad says, "Our corset bones are unbreakable!" you conclude that corset bones often used to break.

Richardson also designed the luxurious Mink Bra. As its name suggests, it was a strapless long-line bra made out of fur, which retailed for 50 guineas in 1962 (around $650 in today's money). Check out a photo of this hilarious novelty garment here.

"Unlike ordinary fashion designing," Richardson told the Australian Women's Weekly in 1961, "foundations have to be essentially practical and exact. The job's rather like accountancy and engineering with a dash of fashion thrown in."

The rad ladies of Berlei: part 2

It was Fred Burley's idea to undertake a sizing survey, in partnership with the University of Sydney Medical School, which dovetailed perfectly with Berlei's pre-existing principles of scientifically precise fit and public showmanship. Public tents were set up on Bondi Beach over the summer of 1926-27, as well as at factories, seaside resorts and Turkish baths around Australia. Berlei's surveyors measured 6000 female volunteers aged between 15 and 65.


The Berlei Figure Type Indicator, invented by Della Lytton Pratt

Della Lytton Pratt was one of two undergraduate USyd science students recruited as research assistants. The students were in charge of collecting, classifying and correlating data from 23 different body measurements per participant, using specially designed calipers and rulers.

The data revealed a strong relationship between hip and waist measurements. Working from this, in 1928 Pratt developed a diagram that became known as the Berlei Figure Type Indicator. This was a cardboard (and, later, plastic) chart designed for corsetières to help fit their customers. It featured a moveable disc printed with bust measurements, and a moveable pointer printed with waist measurements. The hip sizes were printed around the edge of the opening in the base.

So, for instance, if your bust was 35 inches, waist was 28 inches and hips 37 inches (this is the example given in the patent description – I wonder if these were actually Della Pratt's own vital statistics), you'd spin the disc until the '35' printed on it aligned with the '37' printed around the edge. Then you'd slide the pointer so that the little notch on the end aligned with the same spot. And you'd look through the little circular holes on the pointer (in later designs, the whole pointer was see-through) designating waist measurements, and whatever colour peeped through at '28' was the figure type Berlei reckoned you had.



Here are the five colour-coded figure types, as displayed on a 1930s-era Indicator. I think I am Type Ab (Abdomen). Note that these types are all framed as things that are 'wrong' with a woman's body, that the corset can then step in and 'fix'.

Della Lytton Pratt is listed as the owner of the patents for this device in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Great Britain, Canada and the US. Because Della was only 20 and so still a minor at the time, her dad, Major William Pratt of the Royal Australian Engineers, had to sign the deed of 'indenture' that transferred the rights to Della's invention to Berlei.

For her idea – from which Berlei went on to profit handsomely, and which figured prominently in the company's marketing – Della was paid five shillings. It's hard to figure out precisely how much that would be today. There are many ways of calculating historical value – the value of a commodity; of income or wealth; or the cost of a project. Many calculators work off the main currency unit at the time; the only specifically Australian historical value calculator I can find seems to work only in dollars.

This gets tricky if your sources mention shillings, half-crowns and guineas. There were 12 pence to a shilling and 12 shillings to a pound. When Australia switched over to decimal currency in 1966, the conversion was two dollars to a pound, and ten shillings to a dollar.

The Australian pound was introduced in 1910 and was roughly the same value as the UK pound sterling until 1931, so I used the UK values to figure out how much Della got paid. Anyway, Della's measly five shillings would have had the same purchasing power as about $18 today.

When I was researching this stuff earlier in the year I became obsessed with finding out what became of Della Pratt after this. For someone who invented something so clever, she seems to have just given it up and gone on to lead a completely ordinary, unexceptional life.

She graduated in 1928, and I tracked her through newspaper family notices as she married a Philip Oakley in 1930, and moved from Sydney to Gilmore, near Tumut in the NSW Riverina, and then – I think! – further west to Finley, near Deniliquin. Their first child, a daughter, was born in 1931. The Major died in 1932. :-( And from there, the trail goes cold and she vanishes into history.

The rad ladies of Berlei: part 1

Australian lingerie label Berlei has its origins in a small made-to-measure Sydney corset company purchased by brothers Fred and Arthur Burley. Arthur came up with the idea of a Frenchified version of their surname to capitalise on the glamour of continental lingerie, and the company was renamed Berlei Limited in 1919 and incorporated in 1920.

The company grew into a transnational empire with branch offices in Melbourne, Brisbane,  Auckland, Adelaide and Perth. The Burleys believed strongly in scientific fitting principles. They ran annual training seminars for corsetry fitters, and between 1923 and 1926 they employed as Berlei's medical director Dr Grace Fairley Boelke. 

I'm not sure if she was fairly bulky, but she was intellectually brilliant; in 1893 she was one of Sydney Medical School's first two female graduates. In her youth she was also a total babe, with dark hair and striking blue eyes. But her early career suffered due to prejudice against female doctors, and anti-German sentiment during WWI, since she had married a German-born fellow medical graduate, Paul Wilhelm Rudolph Boelke.

Boelke was active in women's suffrage organisations, and in public health policy. She believed alcoholism was a social equity and mental health issue, not a moral failing. In 1919 she presented a research paper on the history and effects of alcohol consumption, noting that French soldiers in Gallipoli were "well supplied with the light wines of their country" and suffered less from dysentery than the British. In 1924 she went to the United States to study the effects of its prohibition of alcohol. As the press reported, she came back "a rabid anti-prohibitionist", determined "to save her country from such a curse"!

Yet I was dispirited to discover that in 1928, Boelke was widely reported as saying the White Australia policy didn't go far enough! She insisted, "Australia will be swamped by the East if she doesn't speedily accept a complete European civilisation." At this time she was living in London, and hopefully not mixing with Oswald Mosley, Diana Mitford and the other British fascists.

Her job at Berlei was partly an OH&S role – she was responsible for the health and welfare of Berlei's 600 (mainly female) employees. On her 1924 US tour she also visited eight factories to observe their workplace safety practices.

But she was also a public face for the pseudo-medical claims the Burleys made for their products. Part of her job was to ensure Berlei's corsets were "anatomically correct". I suspect that she just took their money and said, "Oh, yes, very correct."

In a 1924 lecture on "The Philosophy of Clothes", Boelke said: "If women become slaves to fashion, then it should not be at the cost of health. Men are such 'timid animals', however, that they refuse to see the hygienic value of dressing for their comfort, and stick to high, stiff collars, wearing suits that hold dust and germs."

What a fascinating reversal of the widespread belief that in the past, women were the ones suffering in their stiff, formal clothes!

In the company's trade journal, Berlei Review, the brothers urged willowy flappers to "corset for the future" in order to prevent irreparable damage to "muscles and vital organs", or "excessive figure development in the middle years". This use of corsetry to train, rather than constrain, the female body would have been familiar to women whose mothers and grandmothers had encouraged them to cultivate their figures by corseting early and often.

However, by the 1920s corsets were already past their heyday. Since at least the 1890s, a growing cultural shift encouraged people to sculpt their bodies from the inside, via diet and exercise, rather than from outside by squeezing them with corsetry.

It was a tricky time for Berlei, whose 1920s marketing did reflect the prevailing cultural worship of youthful, sporty silhouettes. Its products had dainty, diminutive product names such as "Corselette" corsets and "Berlette" bras. The implied athleticism of its wrap-on "Dance Girdle" was continued in the annual touring musical revues Berlei staged in theatres and department stores to promote its merchandise; the 1924 revue was titled Youth Triumphant.

In charge of these spectacles was another rad lady: Mary Craven. Her father owned an undergarment factory, which Mary managed before joining Unique Corsets – the company that would become Berlei – in 1915, as a designer.

As part of Berlei's corporate strategy, Mary was regularly sent overseas on study tours to learn the most up-to-date industry trends. She then returned to art-direct and compere the annual revues, which were probably much like today's runway shows in the visually spectacular way they presented clothes, but at the time were absolutely novel.



In 1929, when the revue was titled Lady, Be Beautiful, the Advertiser reported excitedly that: "In Brisbane women held up the traffic in their anxiety to get into the theatre to view this unique corset parade." The Sydney Morning Herald described that show as follows:

The stage setting was attractive and beautiful. The four acts Happiness, Hope, Health, and Triumph symbolised youth, the possibilities of attaining a beautiful figure for the maturer woman; corsetry after surgical treatment; and the importance of correct foundation garments to successful dressing. Each act was supported by a ballet and orchestra. Miss Mary Craven spoke briefly on the features of each model as it was shown.

Interviewed by the Brisbane Courier in 1925, Craven said, "Only the woman who has a perfect digestion, never eats a scrap more food than she actually requires, and takes any amount of exercise can afford to discard corsets, and their absence mars the effect of even the best cut and most garçon-like gown. There was a period, after the war, when there was a craze for no corsets, but the well-dressed woman of to-day realises that they are a necessity."

On abundance

Today I had a house inspection, so last night I had to tidy my bedroom. This made me feel about 15 years old, and let me tell you it hasn't got any more pleasant in the intervening years.

Because I've been frantically working towards my draft manuscript deadline (MONDAY!!!!) I have not been prioritising such minor things as housework, and it took me basically an hour just to put my clothes back on hangers rather than leaving them in a giant pile on the floor of my wardrobe.

Once I did, the scope of my sick addiction to clothes became clear.

Forgive me, Carson, for I have sinned. It has been two years since my last wardrobe cull. Since then, my clothes collection has metastasised to the point where I now own a second chest of drawers, solely for my singlets and T-shirts.

There's a lot of talk about how wasteful cheap clothes are because they 'fall apart' and are 'thrown away after just a few wears'. We are encouraged to spend big bucks on 'investment pieces' from well-known or designer brands. Fuck that. I get excellent value for money from my really, really cheap clothes. I get them from several places:

– Discount department stores such as Target, Kmart and Big W
– Cheap fast-fashion stores such as Femme Connection, Valley Girl, Cocolatte and Cotton On
– Op-shops, garage sales, school fetes and open-air markets

Honestly, I struggle to think of the last time I bought clothes at any other kind of store. Today I'm wearing an American eagle print T-shirt I bought at a $2 shop, a faux-Chanel houndstooth cardigan I got at Savers, a pair of Target pants and Dunlop canvas ballet flats bought from Big W. My earrings are from Valley Girl.

And I wear this shit. The black cardigan I bought in 2007 at Femme Connection for $30 is still a wardrobe staple; I wore it just yesterday. The shoes I'm wearing today date from perhaps 2004. The usual rule – discard anything you haven't worn for a year – simply doesn't work for me, because I cycle between almost all my clothes. And perhaps that's why they are relatively lightly worn.

Last night I decided to be ruthless and donate anything that no longer fits, things I try on but never seem to actually end up wearing out of the house, damaged stuff I've planned to fix but never have, and even the things I've been hoarding 'to sell on eBay'. (The process of selling clothes on eBay – photographing, measuring, writing detailed descriptions, packing and posting – is so labour-intensive it's pretty much not worth it.)

In the past I might have hesitated to donate stained or torn clothing, but my research into the arse-end of the second-hand rag trade has shown me that it's better to put this stuff into the food chain than put it straight into landfill. (There's a blog post in that.)

Five bags of clothes and shoes later, I was aghast at how many things I still had. The sheer abundance of it seemed really disgusting… but on the other hand, I couldn't justify throwing away things I actually like and wear.

It occurred to me that my shopping is about building a collection. I shop with the idea of adding to a repertoire of only very subtly different garments. Often I will become obsessed with a particular style, and decide to collect it in various colours. For instance, I own five flannies in different plaids, four long-sleeved pussy-bow blouses, and seven high-waisted, knee-length full skirts.

Sometimes it can get even more insane: for instance, I own ten striped T-shirts of various stripe widths, sleeve lengths, collar shapes, body lengths and tightnesses… but the colours are only black/red, black/white, red/white and navy/white. I've also mentioned my weakness for cardigans before. Well, in 2010 I had 16 cardigans. Today I have 20… and that's after donating three.

This abundance gives me more to work with when getting dressed each day. It's like composing for an orchestra rather than a quartet. But importantly, it also structures my shopping and makes it seem logical and analytical rather than irrational and emotional. It's about engaging with 'the collection' rather than engaging with 'the body'.

This excellent article about fashion journalism made the point that the Ivy Style phenomenon – currently the subject of a fabulous-looking exhibition at FIT – is about introducing blokey nerd-outs and cultural-capital dick-swinging into the feminised sphere of clothing. Do you know how to fold a pocket square? Do you know how much cuff should peep from your jacket sleeve?

I've been trying to think more critically about gendered ideas of intellectual worth, and more creatively about the extent to which I should buy into them. For instance, I've noticed that I tend to 'masculinise' my thinking about clothes and fashion as a way to combat the widespread perception that fashion is a devalued, 'feminised' sphere. This extends to the detached, intellectual writing style I tend to default to, anticipating a hostile reader ready to criticise me for superficiality or self-indulgence.

But perhaps it's a more radical move to embrace my feelpinions about clothes, to inhabit my writing in recognition of the way that culture is lived and embodied. I'm hoping that perhaps one way around this is to intellectualise my writing on a formal level – on the level of structure and the juxtaposition of ideas – rather than on a content level – the level of writerly tone.

So I can be 'feminine' in admitting the pleasure that my abundant wardrobe brings, but not get bogged down in self-indulgent anecdotes about how I bought all my clothes. Let me assure you, I could totally wallow in that! But it wouldn't be very interesting for the reader.

Interview: Stephanie Trigg on medieval wardrobe malfunctions

Stephanie Trigg is a Professor of English at the University of Melbourne. This was my department when I was a postgrad, and as I walked through the corridors of the John Medley building I could sometimes peek into Stephanie's office and see her at work.

These days I sort of do the same thing in a digital fashion by following her blog, Humanities Researcher. I got really excited when I realised that her work tracing medievalist themes to the present day, and particularly her latest book Shame and Honor: A Vulgar History of the Order of the Garter, resonates with the ideas I'm exploring in my own writing.

I'm delighted that Stephanie so graciously answered my decidedly non-expert questions, and I'll be including parts of this interview in my book.

The Order of the Garter is England's highest chivalric honour – an institution whose pageantry persists today. Intriguingly, it has an origin myth both as populist and as persistent as any superhero's. Here's how Stephanie describes it:

King Edward III was dancing at a ball with a girl, possibly Joan, Countess of Salisbury, possibly his mistress, when her garter falls off so her stocking crumples to the ground. All the courtiers laugh — "Ho ho ho! What an embarrassing thing!" — but the king very chivalrously bends down, picks up that garter, ties it around his own knee and says (in French, of course), "Honi soit qui mal y pense" — "Shamed be he who thinks evil of this." And he says: "I will found a chivalric order in honour of this event that will be so great, all you who now laugh will want to join it!"

Check out this very hammy painting of the scene: Ceremony of the Garter, by Albert Chevallier Tayler, 1901. I love the way Joan's silhouette is much more typical of a corseted Edwardian lady.

Mel Campbell: I was struck by the vulgar 'origin story' of the Order of the Garter basically being a wardrobe malfunction. Today we shame celebrities (and ordinary people) whose clothing goes awry in public – do you see this as a continuation of older attitudes, or as a different, modern phenomenon?

Stephanie Trigg: I think this is a continuation: it’s the collapse of a carefully-controlled public presentation of self, and so this is always intriguing. These ‘malfunctions’ usually remind us of the body beneath the clothing, so they are reminders of our physical mortality, and the sheer animality of our bodies we share beneath the differences of age, beauty, class, et cetera…

It's true we shame celebrities in this way, but we also take pleasure in circulating and re-circulating those images. In that respect it's like the laughter of the crowds in the story of The Emperor's New Clothes. The Emperor is duped into thinking he is wearing magnificent garments but in fact is walking naked, or in his underwear. A small child points this out and everyone laughs. Nevertheless, the Emperor keeps walking, holding his head up high, as the sheer formality of the ritual procession keeps him going, and must be maintained.

I'm so pleased you mention this, because I'm using The Emperor's New Clothes in my book! To me it seems like the origin story of the lady dropping the garter and the king picking it up is gendered, with the female as shameful and the male as the restorer of honour. Have you found in your research that shame is something more often ascribed to women?

It depends very much on the context. In courtly and chivalric literature, the knight who retreats from battle or attacks a woman is publicly shamed. He can be stripped of his knighthood and lose his courtly reputation. And the story of the Garter ostensibly makes a distinction between those men who can appreciate the king's gallantry and those who cannot, who are shamed (according to the Garter motto – honi soit qui mal y pense) if they see anything untoward in the king's behaviour.

But yes, a woman’s body is seen as more shameful than a man’s, in medieval culture. In humoral terms, it’s seen as moist and cold, as compared to the hot and dry male body, so it’s closer to the earth, more physical than spiritual. And in general terms, women are associated more with sexuality, which in Christian culture is often seen as inherently shameful. There is a very vague hint in a nineteenth-century commentary on the Garter story that the offending dropped garter wasn't so much a garter as underwear stained with menstrual blood, so that's an indication that the story was being read then as about women's shameful bodies.

I've been influenced by William Ian Miller's writing on shame and honour in medieval Icelandic epics. He argues that the Icelanders had no concept of internally motivated self-esteem; their sense of honour was entirely bestowed by the community, and so taking away your honour ('shaming' you) was the ultimate punishment. Do you reckon that in England and France, honour and shame were external states like this, or were they internal, deeply felt emotions?

This is a really fascinating question. Conventionally, yes, in heroic and chivalric culture, collective or communal reputation is pre-eminent; and I think shame is usually experienced in a social sense: one is shamed by, or in relation to others. But there is also a deep interest, especially in the later middle ages, on the individual’s relationship with God, and shame sometimes features here. By the later middle ages, I think we are starting to see indications of a more internally experienced sense of shame. Margery Kempe, for example, a fifteenth-century woman who experienced many visions of Christ, opens her narrative saying she had a sin she was too ashamed to confess. We never find out what that is.

What do you think is the difference between shame, humiliation and embarrassment?

I guess embarrassment is the most ephemeral, and the least serious of the three. Humiliation need not have an ethical component. You can be humiliated by defeat in a sporting contest or in battle, or in debate, or by a partner's infidelity, for example. This can feel devastating, but it's just as likely to lead to anger, or determination to do better next time. Shame, on other hand, brings us down very low, because it really implies social judgment not just on particular actions, but on our very personhood, in relation to our infringement of social norms.

Have you done much research into medieval clothing – and medieval underwear – more generally? And if so, what have been your impressions?

Yes, a little. The medieval period, especially the fourteenth century in England, was a time of great anxiety about social instability and economic growth. Clothes became a less reliable indicator of social status, and so sumptuary laws were passed attempting to restrict the wearing of various colours, fabrics and types of fur to particular classes. Clothing was often the subject of satirical commentary or stern critique: Chaucer's Parson in the Canterbury Tales, for example, complains about contemporary fashion for short tunics, and tight-fitting pants.

I don't think underwear was regulated by the sumptuary laws or subject to this kind of critique in this way because it's not normally visible. There would have been great degrees in the quality and fineness of the fabric used. The fourteenth century marks a big shift in clothing, generally, as they started to tailor clothes to the shape of the body, not just holding things in with belts and pins. Not very much underwear survives, and we have to guess a little bit from pictures.

Have you heard much about the so-called 'medieval bra'? Has this discovery caused much discussion among your colleagues?

Yes there was a bit of a flurry on Facebook! We really don’t have much surviving evidence of medieval underwear, so this is an astonishing find: I think it’s the first medieval bra to be found, and it’s remarkably similar in design to modern bras. I think there is also something quite moving about a garment that has been so obviously worn, that bears the traces of intimate touch with a medieval body. It's really quite uncanny to see something that is both historically alien and yet also so ordinary, so familiar to us.

I'm writing about 'retro' cultures, which many people seem to identify with the 20th century, but it could equally be about cherishing older aesthetics and values too. How do you see medievalism used in today's fashions and pop culture, as an aesthetic or as a set of values or ideals?

This can take a number of forms, from the long embroidered dresses of hippie and Indian culture, to some aspects of gothic fashion. Sometimes you see high-end fashion return to a kind of fantastic medievalism: fine metallic meshes that are reminiscent of chain mail, or metallic breastplates and bras that evoke armour plates.



Lena Headey as the villainous queen regent Cersei Lannister in the TV series Game of Thrones. She's wearing an armoured breastplate during a battle scene.



And here's Lucy Liu at this week's Emmy Awards, wearing a Versace gown influenced by armour and chain mail.

Often the medievalism of fashion is mediated by pre-Raphaelite nostalgia for long dresses, rich fabrics, on models with long wavy tresses and big dark eyes like the models of William Morris and Holman Hunt in the nineteenth century.



Medievalist film plays an important role here: think of Helen Mirren's metalllic costumes in John Boorman’s Excalibur; Milla Jovovich as Joan of Arc in The Messenger; or the popularity of pre-Raphaelite paintings, e.g. John Waterhouse’s Ophelia. This is a model of femininity that tends to show women as rather passive, if not doomed to tragic deaths like the Lady of Shalott. The costumes for the heroine in Brian Helgeland’s Knight’s Tale, on the other hand, are a fantastic example of the way something can be both vaguely medieval and also very stylish and avant-garde.



Shannyn Sossamon as Jocelyn in A Knight's Tale.

On the subjective address in non-fiction writing

I've got just over a week to hand in a full draft to my editor, and I've really been struggling with the issue of writerly voice. I've done so much research, in so many broad fields, and it frustrates me that rather than this fascinating stuff about the histories and cultures of size and fit, my editor wants more of my own experiences and anecdotes.

There's so much gold I'm having to summarise or cut out, but luckily I plan to showcase that stuff here on the blog.

I've also written a little essay for the Wheeler Centre about how I fret that adopting a subjective voice simply plays into the prejudices that people already have about the topic of clothes. Here's an extract:

My book needs to embrace subjectivity and embodiment, because it’s about clothing size and fit. I want to celebrate the sensuous pleasures of a garment that hangs, clings and moves in all the right ways, making us feel powerful, relaxed or sexually alluring. I also want to explore the excoriating shame we endure when our clothing doesn’t fit. Those soul-crushing change-room experiences. The public disgust and ridicule that greets wardrobe malfunctions.

But from the beginning of my project, I’ve struggled with the perception that what I’m doing isn’t ‘proper’ journalism. My book is no hard-hitting exposé, no barbecue-stopper that will land me on Q&A. (Well, okay, perhaps my absolute loathing of Q&A might have ruled that one out.)

It’s, like, about fashion, LOL!

‘Fashion has often been relegated to being a woman’s domain, something historically not deemed worthy of critical thought,’ says Serah-Marie McMahon, founding editor of Worn Fashion Journal. Fashion historian Valerie Steele, director of the Museum of the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, adds that most people think of ‘fashion’ as a remote, superficial fairyland of runway shows and red carpet gowns: ‘They don’t identify it with what they are wearing.’

Read the rest at the Wheeler Centre website…

Trying on clothes in shops

I'm starting to write my chapters about clothing size. If fit is the way the clothes are contoured to the human body, size is the set of industrial techniques for mass-producing and mass-marketing clothes. It offers a fascinating history of problem-solving as retailers invent new ways to sell clothes, and changing populations present themselves as new market segments needing to be wooed with new sizes.

But right now, I'm interested in how this system exerts itself on the feelings of the individual shopper. How does it feel to enter a shop, be confronted by displays of clothes, and have to figure out which ones will fit?

More importantly, how does it feel when trying on clothes goes badly? We often imagine that we're the only people who go home empty-handed, feeling like ugly freaks. We imagine that everyone else just waltzes into a shop and picks something off the rack if they like the look of it.

But shopping for clothes is, by definition, a battle. The vulnerable human body, so intriguing in its individual variation, is assaulted from two sides: by the weighty cultural meanings we attach to clothes; and by the implacable heft of the industries trying to sell them to us. This happens to everyone – old, young, thin, fat, men, women.

I plan to share some of my strategies and war stories in my book, but I'm keen to hear yours too. So I've done another one of my trademark surveys about trying on clothes in shops. If you leave your name with the survey, you'll be quoted here on the blog, and/or in my finished book.

Click here to do the survey. It'll only take about five minutes.

On the 'medieval bra'

Several people have forwarded me articles about the 'world's oldest bra'. Dating from the 15th century, it was discovered in 2008 during extensive reconstructions in Lengberg Castle, eastern Tyrol, Austria, but has only been widely reported in the last week following a story in the August 2012 issue of BBC History Magazine.

Several garments that resemble modern women's underwear were found in a vault filled with layers of dry material – straw, twigs and wood, but also leather (old shoes) and textiles (old clothes). They could have been thrown in there simply to dispose of them, or to level the floor when a second storey was added to the castle in the 1480s.

The textiles range from complete, well-preserved linen and wool garments to fragments. Some belonged to men, while the small cuff circumference on some of the shirts suggests they were worn by women or children. Basically, it's a complete fluke that this stuff has survived to the present, a quirk of the dry archival conditions in which it's inadvertently been stored.

But you wanna know about the bra, right? Well, there were four items resembling contemporary bras. Two of them were kind of like crop tops; they end right under the breasts, but cover the decolletage. These were trimmed with lace along the hems. A third garment had broad shoulder straps that widen into the cups like a halter-neck top, and was elaborately decorated with lace on the straps, between the cups and along the hem.

What makes them most like contemporary bras is the use of tailored cups, rather than a simple flat band across the breast, as worn in ancient Greece and Rome.



This mosaic from the Villa Romana del Casale in Sicily is often dubbed the 'bikini girls' for obvious reasons, but these women are clearly athletes and their 'bikinis' look much more like contemporary elite running apparel.



This is Melissa Breen, currently Australian 100m and 200m champion and soon to represent Australia at the London Olympics.

But anyway, the fourth garment is the one that most resembles a modern bra, and is the one most frequently depicted in the current media coverage. It extends to the bottom of the ribcage, and there's an extant row of eyelets on the left side in which laces would be inserted to fasten it.



Most of the torso and back is missing, so it's unclear how it originally looked. But what annoys me is the photo comparing this garment to a 1950s-style longline bra, as if to suggest that's how it would have looked when intact.

You can see the two garments aren't even cut the same way! (The medieval garment has vertical seams down the centre of the cups.) And what might look to us like a low-cut cleavage might well be an accident of where the 15th-century linen has torn over time.



We often try to make these connections through time to make history seem less distant, much as we call the Roman athletes 'bikini girls'. Because the older garment looks like its modern equivalent, we see them as a teleological trajectory of fashion, with our own garments as the logical and most 'evolved' version.

For instance, a 1932 feature article in the Chicago Sunday Tribune located the corset's 'origin' in the image of the bare-breasted Minoan snake goddess, despite the fact that Minoan art also depicted slender waists on men who are not wearing corset-like bodices.

  

The same article contrasts what was then the modern corset, “a subtle, supple thing of silk and elastic”, with the corset of yore, “a torturous device of leather and steel”. Trouble is, metal corsets were almost certainly orthopaedic – meant to correct deformed bodies.



Of course, we now see 1930s corsets as restrictive. It seems to be human nature in every era to interpret the clothes of the past as 'primitive' versions of our own familiar apparel.

So basically, the Lengberg textiles are not "the world's oldest bra", and they don't prove that bras were "invented" 500 years earlier than we thought. While they might serve a similar sartorial function to a bra, they are completely separate garments with their own cultural context. So… what might that be?

The huge significance of this Austrian find is that it's the first extant medieval underwear. Until recently, our ideas of medieval clothing came only from illuminated manuscripts and artworks, from literature, and from written records such as clothing inventories or receipts, wills (clothing was often bequeathed, but you wouldn't give your undies to your heirs!) and the rules of religious orders.

For instance, while regulations on monks' clothing mention shirts, stockings/hose and under-breeches (known as braies), chemises and stockings are the only underwear listed as being allocated to nuns, leading us to conclude they didn't wear anything else. This is also borne out in E Jane Burns' analysis of gender and underwear in the French Prose Lancelot.

Burns quotes one instance in Chrétien de Troyes's Le Chevalier de la Charrette (c1180) where a damsel being ravished is "villainously held down … uncovered to the waist." This means she's not wearing any drawers under her chemise.

But what about on the top half?

Christina Frieder Waugh writes (PDF link) that in medieval poetry, a beautiful woman's breasts were often described as being "hard as little apples". Umberto Eco's much-cited book Art & Beauty in the Middle Ages quotes Gilbert of Hoyland's Sermones in Canticum Salomonis, on ideals of feminine beauty:

The breasts are most pleasing when they are of moderate size and eminence…they should be bound but not flattened, restrained with gentleness but not given too much licence.

The same Gilbert of Hoyland who had such definite opinions on women's breasts was a 12th-century English Cistercian abbot. Waugh quotes him advising his monks to practise restraint, much as women restrain their boobs!!

For what are they more anxious to avoid in embellishing the bosom, than that the breasts be overgrown and shapeless and flabby? … Therefore they constrain overgrown and flabby breasts with breast-bands, artfully remedying the shortcomings of nature.

And in the Romance de la Rose, a 13th-century poem by two authors, the Old Woman character offers what's basically a medieval French version of Cosmo magazine advice:

And if her breasts are too full, let her take a kerchief or scarf and wrap it round her ribs to bind her bosom, and then fasten it with a stitch or knot; she will then be able to disport herself.

Beatrix Nutz, a University of Innsbruck archaeologist who's writing her thesis on the Lengberg textiles, cites French royal surgeon Henri de Mondeville's description, in his Cyrurgia: “Some women… insert two bags in their dresses, adjusted to the breasts, fitting tight, and they put them [the breasts] into them [the bags] every morning and fasten them when possible with a matching band.”

A satirical poem by an unknown 15th-century German author also refers to "breastbags" or "bags for the breasts":

…with them she roams the streets, so that all the young men that look at her, can see her beautiful breasts; But whose breasts are too large, makes tight pouches, so there is no gossip in the city about her big breasts.

What's interesting is that the 'bags' here seem more structured than a band, and also adjustable to the size of the breasts. Perhaps the greatest cultural similarity between contemporary bras and the Lengberg textiles is that in the 15th century, large breasts were interpreted as excessive and licentious – much as they are now.

Dressing Downton

Tomorrow, Thursday 28 June, I'll be on a panel at ACMI discussing Downton Abbey. My particular focus will be on the costumes: how they're sourced; how they reflect character; and how they create an atmosphere of 'historical accuracy' within which the narrative nestles. It's the costumes that make a 'costume drama'.

I'll be writing up my presentation as an essay for Kill Your Darlings. Here are a few screencaps from my slideshow to give you a taste of what I'll be showing.











Incidentally, 'Dressing Downton' is also a dressmaking and costuming project spearheaded by The Girl with the Star-Spangled Heart. Sewing enthusiasts are invited to blog their Downton Abbey-inspired projects, and you can see pics of their work.

What dress size am I?

Almost a month ago, I voyaged to Southland shopping centre to participate in a sizing survey being undertaken by Target using 3D body scanning technology. The scanner was travelling to various Australian capital city shopping centres as the retailer collected 10,000 datasets.

Haha, guess who's got two 3D-scannable thumbs & is going to Target Southland this weekend to see the 3D body scanner in action? ME!
— Mel Campbell (@incrediblemelk) May 10, 2012

When I mentioned this on Twitter, I was really surprised by the utter confusion and suspicion people expressed about what 3D body-scanning was and how it worked. I thought it was pretty self-explanatory. A machine scans your body and records precise biometric data that you can then use to shop for clothes.

Due to me not realising how long it takes to get to Southland on public transport, I arrived there with only 20 minutes before the centre closed, so the blurriness of the phone pics I took reflects the unaccustomed aerobic activity of finding the damn thing in time, as well as my usual shaky hands that mean I seldom manage to take an in-focus photo.



Here's the setup. It wasn't in the actual Target store but in the mall itself. As you can see, people of all ages were queueing up to get scanned. You can see one lady holding the little form we had to fill out, in which we listed name, age, race/ethnicity (I wrote "Caucasian/Anglo" and felt like some creepy KKK member), email, phone and postcode. Presumably Target will cross-match those details with its biometric data to build a picture of how body shape varies demographically.

We also had to promise not to horse around in the machine, and acknowledge that Target was not responsible for any injuries we might incur in there. Yikes!



Here's the little booth. You stand on footprints on the floor and hold your arms slightly out from your body. A vertically mounted scanning bar whizzes in a circle around you once, then makes another pass in the opposite direction, presumably to check its measurements. It takes less than 30 seconds. Then you're done, and you get a printout with your stats on it.

But while you're standing there, trying to be very still, you have to look at an unnerving bullseye on the wall of the booth. This mingles unfortunately with people's anxieties over the intimate nature of 3D body scanning, which stem not just from the idea of having your vulnerable body assessed in such a robotic way, but also from most people's only prior experience with the technology – at airport security. The fact we had to decant our personal belongings into what looked like cat litter trays only added to this Homeland Security atmosphere.

Let's face it, if any other retailer had done this survey, it would have been instantly far less creepy. Look at all the staff with targets on their backs!!



The nerdy guy with the computer was responsible for running the system. I was immensely relieved that I did not receive a visualisation of my body in 3D; just the vital statistics.

I've gotta say I felt crushed, though, at the clothing size the scanner told me I should be wearing. Somehow, the fact my size had been assessed by a computer felt much more authoritative and conclusive than if someone had done it with a tape measure. I felt very fat and depressed.

I have an entire chapter of my book that examines the way culture teaches us to identify so strongly with clothing size – which is ridiculous, as it is a completely arbitrary and inconsistent system – and to feel such strong emotions of satisfaction and shame based on these numbers.

But I also wonder if other people bring that same level of scrutiny and judgment to our bodies that we do to ourselves. I was curious to see if people could 'tell' what dress size I wear simply by looking at me. So last weekend, I decided to ask some sales assistants.

Forever New is an Australian chain catering to young women, which offers feminine, sophisticated and slightly retro looks at fast-fashion prices. It is preposterous that I would ever fit into any of their clothes; I only go in there to look at the accessories. The young sales assistant there assessed me as a size 14, but said that the size I took would vary according to style; they have a lot of waisted dresses with full skirts, but also A-line shifts.

Sussan has an older, more maternal target market; while still offering fashionable styles and colours, their sizing is more generous and they do a lot of sleepwear. Appropriately, an older, more maternal sales assistant advised me that I would be a "medium to large". Again, she said this would vary on the style I chose, and she said that once I'd found something I liked, she could help me with sizes.

This is when I gave up my mystery-shopping experiment. I realised that because sales assistants are trained to make sales, they will always flatter the customer and try to find something in the store to sell them. It's much like the complicated dance of the bra fitter.

Even my friends, family and colleagues would feel bad about telling me, to my face, what size they thought I was, because clothing sizes are so psychologically fraught.

So I have decided on another experiment: an anonymous survey in which you can tell me what dress size you think I wear.

Click here to take the survey – it involves about a minute of your time.

High retro anxiety

This weekend I'm going to the Melbourne leg of Love Vintage, a travelling vintage, retro and antique expo that heads around Australia throughout the year. I'm familiar with the phenomenon of vintage fairs; years ago I wrote up The Way We Wear for Is Not Magazine and Hello Sailor for ThreeThousand, but I find actually going to these events very intimidating.

For a start, I rarely find anything that fits me in a vintage shop. That was the catalyst for my current book project. Second – and more importantly – I feel very worried about being judged sartorially by people who are much more into vintage than I am. The vintage subculture feels like a club whose membership can instantly be extended or denied with a single assessing look at someone's outfit.

As well as Jaunty Pussy, I would call my dress sense 'low retro'. That is, I am inspired by looks ranging from the 1950s to the 1970s, I own a lot of preppy, old-fashioned clothes, wear winged eyeliner and browline glasses most days, and I guess Stam is an old-fashioned frame handbag. But I don't aim for period-accuracy, and I usually mix the retro stuff up with contemporary items.

On an evening last April I found myself on a tram sitting opposite a 'high retro' chick. She had a rolled fringe and was wearing a cardigan over a red, white and blue striped sailor-esque outfit. The dark regrowth in her blonde hair, her set face and harsh, heavy makeup reminded me of a '40s working-class girl – like something from Come In Spinner, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll or Caddie.

I could see her suspiciously eyeing my low-retro getup: my glasses and eyeliner; button-through floral frock, cardigan and bag. I felt as if she were judging me on her standards, and deciding that I had tried and failed to be high retro.

So I am very intimidated about what to wear on Friday to the opening night of Love Vintage, as there will be a 'best dressed' fashion parade and I imagine everyone there will be pulling out their best looks. Unfortunately, I pulled the trigger on my own best look too early; I wore it to a country vintage fair last Sunday.

I took my parents, and it was a lovely Mother's Day outing, but to be honest I was disappointed by the small scale of the fair, and I felt embarrassed that I'd got dressed up, because the only other people dressed like me were Miss Lulu and Miss Ruby Rabbit, the pinup hairdo ladies, and Lauren Randle of Castlemaine vintage store The Reclaimed Room. I had a nice chat with Lauren, though.

Today I was looking through my wardrobe and fretting that nothing in there looked high retro enough. I started pulling dresses out and laying them on the bed and then laying necklaces and cardigans on top, and then I started fiddling with my hair, and then ultimately this is what I ended up wearing today:



I am not trying very hard. I didn't bother to straighten my fringe or curl my hair; I just did victory rolls, which is incredibly easy once you get the hang of it; these ones don't even have any hairspray fixing them in place.

The look is vaguely 1940s, I suppose. It's hard to see in the photo, but my teal blouse matches the sequins on my cardigan. The blouse has puffed sleeves and lots of pintucks along the shoulder seams, and is tucked into a pair of high-waisted black harem pants. I'm also wearing my half-wingtips, half-sneakers, which I got from a Richmond garage sale recently for $5.



I am still low retro, but I'm climbing a little higher than usual. Hopefully by Friday I will be high enough to pass muster among the hardcore vintage aficionados.

Underwear in action

Historical underwear is usually fetishised. The garments themselves, in museums, as historical artefacts. Period advertisements for those garments, as consumer artefacts. Caricatures fetishise the wearing of the underwear as a ridiculous sign of vanity. Then, of course, historical erotica fetishises underwear sexually – that is, the form of fetishisation with which we're most familiar.

But when we fetishise historical underwear – that is, focus obsessively on it as an object and imbue it with an almost magical meaning – we lose perspective on what it was like to wear these garments on an everyday basis. It's very difficult to view images of the past without bringing our own fetishes to them (Indeed, our ideas of how to wear and comport ourselves in old-fashioned underwear often come from our own narratives set in the past and vintage fetish imagery), or misreading historical fetishes as objective truths about the past. We should aim to tread a middle path.

When we think of 'sexy underwear', for instance, it seems commonsensical to wear a garter belt over underpants, as Dita von Teese does here:

But in pinup illustrations and vintage 'naughty postcards', we often see the undies worn over the garter belt so the suspenders emerge from beneath, as in this 1969 Gil Elvgren illustration:





And this one, from 1954. Elvgren's girls always have such hilarious wardrobe malfunctions involving their skirts getting ripped off, stuck in machinery, or snagged on fences and nearby trees…

From the shoes, the images below seem to be from the 1920s or 1930s. Stockings from this era are also, apparently, quite recognisable for the sheen they give the legs; this is when semi-synthetic 'artificial silk' appeared; it was renamed Rayon in 1927. Nylon didn't come in until 1940.







Here, we see a corset modelled over the top of the chemise or camiknickers, with attached suspenders. Also, notice how the purpose of the corset is not to cinch the waist but to slim and smooth the abdomen and hips. Speaking of corsets, these days they tend to be worn as an alluring undermost garment:



…but back in the day, when corsets were everyday items, you wouldn't do that because you would sweat into your expensive corset or get chafing, even abrasions. A chemise was always worn underneath, as in this image from the 1900s.



Note how the suspenders attached to the corset bunch up the chemise.


Blogger and US Civil War re-enactor Scott B Lesch noticed that his female colleagues were wearing their drawers under their shifts, as we might wear underpants under a slip. But he unearthed quite a few archival references to the earlier practice of tucking one's shift into one's drawers (which had no crotch seam; they were only attached to the waistband, so ladies could relieve themselves without getting undressed).

If you weren't careful, or the chemise was too long, it poked out the back and your little brother laughed at you:



At this time, stockings were held up with leg garters rather than suspenders, which were hidden under the chemise and drawers.


The trouble with using naughty postcards as source material is that they probably do depict sexually fetishistic practices from the time they were photographed. Take this image, for instance:



Whether or not it has been airbrushed, it almost certainly depicts a participant in a tight-lacing fetish culture. We're tempted to claim that everyone in "the Victorian era" tight-laced – mainly because of the moral panic media coverage about it at the time – but it was only a niche practice. We marvel at the tiny waist dimensions of corsets in museums, but of course they were seldom worn completely closed. Besides, women's bodies were trained to wear corsets from a very early age.



Meanwhile, advertisements for underwear speak so conspicuously of comfort and fit that we should be skeptical that they really depict the lived experience of wearing the underwear. A slightly different picture emerges when we look at the 'toilette' genre of art, which was basically an excuse for painters to depict women in attractive states of déshabillé.

While some of these paintings depict the fashion that began in pre-revolutionary France to invite people over to hang out and gossip with you while you got dressed, others depict women in a dreamy, vulnerable state somewhere between nudity and social visibility.


Woman at Her Toilette, Edgar Degas, 1876-77


Femme à la Toilette, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, 1896.


La Toilette, Georges Croegaert, 1891

They also offer information about how and in which order garments were donned. In Pietro Longhi's Lady at the Toilette (1736), we see the decorative petticoat, neckline and sleeves that will end up peeping from the pink outer dress her maid is holding out.





But if we are to believe Nicolas-René Jollain's La Toilette, the hat always went on first.

The 40-year nostalgia cycle

Having written about nostalgia and re-enactment – and earlier about cycles of retro – I've just been pointed (thanks, Jess!) to this New Yorker piece by Adam Gopnik, who identifies a 40-year lag between history as experienced, and as re-enacted.

Gopnik argues that this happens because the creators and gatekeepers of pop culture are largely in their forties. "Forty years past is the potently fascinating time just as we arrived, when our parents were youthful and in love, the Edenic period preceding the fallen state recorded in our actual memories."

And so, if we can hang on, it will be in the twenty-fifties that the manners and meanings of the Obama era will be truly revealed: only then will we know our own essence. A small, attentive child, in a stroller on some Brooklyn playground or Minneapolis street, is already recording the stray images and sounds of this era: Michelle’s upper arms, the baritone crooning sound of NPR, people sipping lattes (which a later decade will know as poison) at 10 A.M.—manners as strange and beautiful as smoking in restaurants and drinking Scotch at 3 P.M. seem to us. A series or a movie must already be simmering in her head, with its characters showing off their iPads and staring at their flat screens: absurdly antiquated and dated, they will seem, but so touching in their aspiration to the absolutely modern. Forty years from now, we’ll know, at last, how we looked and sounded and made love, and who we really were. It will be those stroller children’s return on our investment, and, also, of course, a revenge taken on their time.

Gopnik is onto something. There is already a movement to post online the youthful images of one's parents – and even grandparents or other ancestors – and to appreciate their clothes, their hairstyles, and their attitudes as cool and chic by today's standards.

Perhaps this identification with one's parents (before they were parents) is an attempt to find a personal connection to the past that doesn't rely on one's own memories. It's literally intergenerational nostalgia.

When I see my friends posting pictures of themselves with their young children on Facebook, I imagine myself as those kids all grown up, looking back nostalgically at how happy and beautiful their parents were, unaware of how these dudes, my friends, are just getting through their day-to-day lives. It makes me melancholy.



This image (from Dads Are The Original Hipsters) is undated, but the slogan on the T-shirt sounds like a riff on the Soup Nazi from Seinfeld – wittily contemporary, yet ominously true. Do we have no future when we constantly look to the past?

Historical re-enactment as political forgetting

Yesterday, April 25, was Anzac Day, an Australian and New Zealand national holiday to commemorate war dead. Ideologically it's best compared to the US's Memorial Day, as it arose from a specific conflict (in this case, oddly, a disastrous military blunder in April 1915 that unnecessarily claimed tens of thousands of lives) yet has become generalised as an event of national remembrance in a way that, ironically, Remembrance Day has not.

The motto of Anzac Day is "Lest we forget". It has become a ritual text, almost an incantation, along with the third verse of Robert Lawrence Binyon's poem For The Fallen, which is inscribed on many Australian war memorials:

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

But Jeff Sparrow's current essay at Overland begins with a contentious claim: "Anzac Day celebrates forgetting."

For Sparrow, the political context of World War I has been almost entirely forgotten by an Australian population that thinks of war as a specific brand of hellishness utterly removed from everyday life, calling on a form of courage and sacrifice utterly lacking in civil affairs. Hence, it requires a response of horror and attempted empathy, rather than social or political critique.

I really recommend reading Sparrow's article if you've ever felt uneasy about the celebration of nationalist warriors as righteous Übermenschen. But what struck me as relevant to my project is Sparrow's observation about the increasingly common Australian pilgrimages to the Gallipoli peninsula, the birthplace of the Anzac mentality:

The attendees at the dawn service do not ask themselves why Australians died invading a country thousands of miles away. No, that particular issue’s rendered inherently irrelevant, since the backpackers go there not to think about history but to marvel at the height of the cliffs and the sharpness of the rocks, and to feel an awe at people their own age experiencing horrors that they couldn’t imagine. The question arising from the pilgrimage is thus not ‘why did it happen?’ (a query that leads not only into history but into politics) but rather ‘what did it feel like?’, an aestheticisation of the past that’s explicitly anti-political. [my emphasis]

For me Sparrow isn't really speaking of aestheticising the past, but of phenomenologising it: seeking an understanding of how it felt to live through the past. This is a key aspect of my project, because clothing fit is so clearly about phenomenology – about the experience of wearing clothes, as well as how one looks in those clothes.

However, Sparrow's article has given me pause about whether the desire to empathise with the past is a worryingly anti-political gesture that evacuates the past of its context, filling it instead with today's political imperatives (even if that is, as Sparrow argues in this case, a political imperative to 'forget politics'). We are driven to re-enact things rather than to analyse or question them, because as Sparrow argues, "the question ‘what did it feel like?’ always implies a follow-up: ‘I wonder what it would be like.’"

There are, of course, many military re-enactment groups who gather on weekends to play out famous battles, and medieval or Renaissance groups who compete in mock-tourneys. On a wider level, many people re-enact favourite historical periods in their everyday lives by consuming goods from those periods – as 'commodity nostalgia'.

I've thought a fair bit about nostalgia. In 2010 I wrote an essay on whether there is an ethical dimension to nostalgia, or whether it is always anti-political, or politically conservative.

And in 2009 I wrote an op-ed on Mad Men theme parties as nostalgic events. In it I mentioned an exhibition of Australian modernist design from 1917-1967 that was showing at the time. At a public forum discussing the influence of modernism on design today, industry heavyweight Garry Emery remarked that people today focus on the aesthetics of modernism without considering its political aims (which ranged from utopian to iconoclastic).

I might also highlight the irony of this disconnectedness – that a design philosophy based on functional rather than aesthetic principles has come to be appreciated for its aesthetics alone. But I mention it here as it seems uncannily to foreshadow Sparrow's contention that, viewed retrospectively, aesthetics are anti-political.

My article appeared in the A2 lifestyle section of The Age and isn't archived online; however let me quote:

In a sense, Mad Men parties are a hipper version of those much-maligned historical re-enactment societies. Both create a vision of the past that is self-consciously imaginary and ephemeral. Yet they allow participants to feel a mastery over the past by experiencing – with their eyes, tastebuds, the bodily sensations of unfamiliar clothes and hairstyles – what it might have been like to live it. [again, my emphasis]

I feel anxious now about those words "mastery over the past", because I don't believe it's a good thing to feel that the passage of years allows us to understand history more perfectly than the people of the past understood it at the time.

Who gets to be the expert on, say, corsets? Us, examining them in museums and in old advertisements and magazines, or dressing up in them for special events? Or the women who wore corsets on an everyday basis, the way we wear bras?

Historical Disney princesses

If you're interested in historical dress, Disney or Tumblr, you have probably already come across Claire Hummel's illustrations in which she reinterprets the Disney princesses in outfits that are historically appropriate to the time when the films are set.

I came across them last year in one of those un-annotated Tumblr photosets whose origins were lost several hundred reblogs ago, but I've only just discovered Hummel's thoughtful, well-researched rationales for her choices.



That's Belle from Beauty and the Beast, obviously. What I like about the images is that Hummel has worked hard to keep the recognisable tropes of the characters intact, while being imaginative about their historical contexts.

"Beauty and the Beast has always hovered hesitantly in the late 18th century (especially in the earlier concept art), so I redid Belle's gold dress to match 1770's French court fashion," she writes of this image.

It's fascinating stuff because the Disney films are already such 'impure' texts, with such hazy evocations of time and place, full of anachronisms and anatopisms. Of Mulan, Hummel says, "pinning down her time period stopped being fun and rapidly became a headache- you have the original legend taking place in the Wei Dynasty, the Huns as an actual threat during the Western Han Dynasty, the Forbidden City of the Ming Dynasty, the hanfu fashion setting it earlier AGHGHGhjffjhfghgjhkh".

And of Pocahontas: "the shell necklace should in theory be a deep purple (turquoise is a much more Southwestern commodity), but you lose so much of the Pocahontas visual identity without the splash of teal around her neck."

The project throws an agreeable doubt blanket on the entire idea of 'historical accuracy', about which it's really easy to get pedantic.

Fit as narrative in period film and television

At this stage, at least one chapter of my book will discuss ill-fitting clothes in popular culture, from Cinderella to The Incredible Hulk. But I'm already running into trouble when it comes to contemporary texts set in past eras.

For a historian, it's reasonable to conclude that the attitudes towards size and fit displayed in a book, a film, a TV show, a comic book, etc, are those of the time the text was created. These change over time as texts are remade by new generations. For instance, think of the way the Batsuit has changed from Adam West's almost vulnerable-looking leotard and satin undies to Christian Bale's carapace-like Kevlar armour. And take a look at my old post comparing Honor Blackman's catsuit in the 1960s Avengers to Uma Thurman's in the 1998 movie.

But when it comes to period-set texts, we have a certain suspension of disbelief. We're prepared to take the author, the screenwriter, the production designer and costume designer's words for it that we are seeing an 'authentic' representation of a particular era. 

But we are wise to be skeptical of these images as transparent visions of 'what it was like', because like any other reinterpretation of a text, they apply our own ideas about clothing size and fit. For instance, take what I reckon is the single worst-costumed period film of all time: the 1940 version of Pride and Prejudice starring Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier:

Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice was published in 1813. They've got Darcy's look down okay, but Lizzie looks absolutely wrong. Her hairstyle is totally '40s with the upper hair in a smooth puff and lower hair in rolls curled towards the neck, whereas fashion plates and portraits of the early 19th century depict a chignon on the back of the head with small ringlets softly clustering around the temples.

Meanwhile, the voluminous skirt, nipped waist and shawl collar of her dress are far more contemporary than the Empire-waisted columnar silhouette of the period. The middle image of the three below is closer to how young women would have dressed at that time (more 1813 fashion plates are here)

I also want to include this image to show that while we tend to think of 'Regency fashions' as being relatively stable over time, they altered just as fashion always has and still does. In the image on the far right, you can see the migration of the waist closer to its natural point, and the broadening of the skirt to a bell shape.

Mind you, sometimes period costumes are quite accurate. Here is Queen Victoria's 1840 wedding dress, which was vastly influential for wedding fashions (not least of all, the tradition of brides wearing white):



And here is the dress Mia Wasikowska wore in last year's Jane Eyre (costume by Michael O'Connor). Jane Eyre was published in 1847 but Jane's wedding took place several years earlier than her narrative.



As I wrote a few years ago in a feature article about period film casting, "what we really seek from contemporary historical cinema are emotional truths: impervious to anachronism, resonating down the ages to reassure us of the universality of human experience."

In the service of this universality, costuming is often used as narrative metaphor. For instance, contemporary period dramas often use corsetry and voluminous dresses to mimetically convey women 'trapped' or 'subjugated' by class and marriage (for instance, in Marie Antoinette, Titanic and The Duchess).

Mad Men is set in the 1960s but similarly seeks universal emotional truths, even though its meticulous strivings towards period-accuracy are a key marketing strategy. Season 5 episode 3, 'Tea Leaves', which aired last week in the US, has a storyline in which Betty has become a sad, fat hausfrau. In the opening scene, her children struggle unsuccessfully to help her do up her dress…



…and she has to plead "a women's thing" (which isn't actually a lie – wardrobe malfunctions are often presented as a feminine failing) to avoid the humiliation of being seen to have gained weight.



Meanwhile at chez Draper, Megan slips easily into her own dress…



and is promptly zipped up by Don, cementing that Megan has just as easily slipped into Betty's place at his side. What makes this juxtaposition quite unfair, however, is the issue of ease. Betty's dress is super-fitted, whereas Megan's is loose through the dropped waist.



Later, at the doctor's office, Betty wears a horrible, boxy synthetic knit jacket. "Betty Draper – I almost didn't recognise you!" says an acquaintance who runs into her. Throughout the episode, Betty wears garish housedresses and dressing gowns in bright synthetics, as opposed to the cool pastel palette and sleek, fitted lines she wore in the show's earlier seasons.

Universality aside, I really appreciated a line of dialogue in which dropping a few pounds is referred to as "reducing" rather than the more familiar (to our ears) "slimming" or "weight loss". I've just finished reading Calories and Corsets, Louise Foxworth's excellent cultural history of dieting, in which she extensively quotes diet books and advertisements going back centuries. While reading the book I was struck by the way "reducing" or even "reducing flesh" was a favoured 19th- and 20th-century turn of phrase, and so I was pleased to see it in Mad Men.