A pointer or six on the nature of fashion.
IT RAINED brassieres in the 1970s, so the theory goes. Liberated women flung their cross-your-hearts into spitting flames around the country. Emptied their smalls drawers into the fires of gender politics. Unhooked, unbuckled, unburdened their knockers to swing free in the breeze. Whoopee.
Bollocks. By my calculations – based on a highly scientific survey of three photographs and four dinner-parties-worth of anecdotal data – only three-and-a-half women with a cup size more voluptuous than double-A did actually hoist all their Hestias into oblivion. What bra-burning there was, was more a symbolic than literal business, involving old ones gone manky and ready for the rag-bag anyway. Those B-cup and bigger libbers who did dance around the odd legendary bra-fire, simply snuck away later and hooked their nicer, pinker, newer Berleis and Hestias right back up again with a “phew” and a girdle to match.
Any woman blessed with a waist, hips and breasts more substantial than fried eggs, knows why. Proper, structured brassieres and girdles are too good to let go for just any old cultural upheaval. Heaven is in their lift and firm, grippy nature, the woman-shaped, mollusc-like, invincible armour of them. The gorgeousness, for God’s sake!
Ditto for proper, steel-boned life-sucking corsets, which is the likely reason, 70 years before our most recent bout of women’s liberation, that no similar myth about their mass-burning whipped up around the late 19th century suffragette movement. And yet – God knows – suffragettes had more reason to link corsets with misogyny and oppression than libbers ever did to brassieres. Right into the 20th century, corsets were still hard laced and whale-boned, often clenched so tightly into kidneys, liver, lungs and uterus that the most pampered of the most delicate of the most fashionable of ladies frequently crumpled like a silky sack of spuds from “the vapours” or, worse, keeled over dead.
Yep. They were intelligent and well aware; it was hard to bend, tricky to breathe, painful to move around but, by jingo, that cramped hourglass figure was devilish attractive! And so damned fashionable!
Thank the Goddess, we’ve evolved since those dopey days. No suffering, no painful fakeries for us Modernistas. No rib-crusher brassieres or fandango-cramping skinnyjeans, no brick-high platform heels, no carcinogenic hair dyes, lash tints, nail glues, tan fakers, skin bleachers, laser scrapers, botulism derivative skin injectables. Or similar. For fashion.
No sirree.
(Janice Breen Burns: jbb@voxfrock.com.au)
