More Ridiculous Fashions

Here is another example of stupidity in the name of fashion and beauty. 20″ waistline, anyone? Those poor girls couldn’t even dress themselves because they had to be tied into a corset that was so tight that it squeezed all their organs down to the lower end of the stomach area and made it almost impossible to breathe. No wonder they kept fainting in those days!

And, to make the tiny waistlines even more pronounced, they made skirts so big that they had to wear them over some kind of stiff cage made from whalebones or some such thing. The poor girls had to learn how to sit in such a way that their walebone cage wouldn’t spring up and hit them in the face (and expose their underwear, god forbid!) Legs had to be hidden at all costs, while breasts would be squeezed and pushed together until it looked like they were going to burst over the top of the dress. Talk about cleavage! But, no, bare legs were more indecent than bulging breasts!

This, of course, sounds like another idea created by men. By making women focus on hiding their legs and not their breasts, they got to enjoy their breasts in public!

My mother just told me that one of the Danish queens at the beginning of the last century actually had two of her ribs removed on each side so that she could make her waist line even smaller. Ribs removed??? It seems that fashion and insanity always go hand in hand!

Again, we see the patterns. Small waistlines are beautiful. Then, the tendency became to make them smaller and smaller with the use of killer corsets. In the end, the obsession with tiny waistlines became so extreme that they started using surgery to create the impossible. Then someone started realizing how ridiculous it was, the fad died and fashions went in the opposite direction. By 1920, the women wore shapeless tube dresses which flattened their chests and didn’t show any waistlines whatsoever. Again, it went from one extreme to another…
Previous Post

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 13th, 2009 at 8:44 am and is filed under Fashion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.