Date: 30-11-1999
Owning Institution:
Publication: Sunday Telegraph Features      
Subject:   18th Century  20th Century  

“In olden days a glimpse of stocking

  Was looked on as something shocking,

  Now heaven knows -

  Anything goes.”

Cole Porter’s lines could stand as the epigraph to Shelley Tobin’s Inside Out: A Brief History of Underwear, which is one of those books that takes a small subject – in this case, smalls – and makes something rather large and fascinating out of it. Tobin’s history of stays and corsets, hoops and crinolines, petticoats, bras and basques, turns out to be an eccentric history of all sorts of other things too: the changing shape of the “ideal” female form; the perennial conflict in fashion between the natural and the artificial; the gradual triumph of permissiveness over restraint; women’s lib; and how to choose the right colour of knickers.

The idea of underwear as something to be looked at and enjoyed, rather than furtively glimpsed, is a relatively modern phenomenon. Tobin identifies the start of the twentieth century as the turning point, the moment when a new and more freely hedonistic attitude to underwear began to take hold – aided and abetted by revolutions in fibre technology that would eventually lead to Rayon, Lycra, and other alluringly sheer and diaphanous fabrics.

In 1902, a certain Mrs Pritchard wrote an interestingly titled volume The Cult of Chiffon, in which she claimed that “the woman possessed of the laudable desire to appear lovely in her husband’s eyes will not fail, if she be wise in her generation, to give this part of her wardrobe careful consideration.” It was a revolutionary remark for the time. As Tobin comments, “the right to wear colourful underwear had to be fought for, because Victorian attitudes died hard”. She illustrates the point by quoting from Eleanor Glyn’s novel, The Vicissitudes of Evangeline, also published in 1902, in which the eponymous heroine is much criticised by her elders and betters for acquiring an elaborately embroidered neglige. As one of them tut-tuttingly remarks, “No nice-minded woman wants to look becoming in bed.” 

The publication of Inside Out coincides with an exhibition charting the rise and fall of French drawers and other essential undergarments at Killerton House, a National Trust property near Exeter which houses the unparalleled lingerie collections of the late Paulise de Bush. Those unfamiliar with the history of underwear are likely to be impressed by the astonishing impracticality of some of the garments on display, such as Victorian crinolines – great hooped structures made of tensile steel over which, like tents, the spreading court dresses of the day could be arranged. Shelley Tobin, who curated the exhibition (which continues until September), has had to deal with numerous queries concerning them:

“I particularly remember one member of the public who asked the very reasonable question of how women managed to go to the loo when they were wearing their crinolines. The simple answer is that we don’t really know. The modern lavatory cubicle, into which you certainly wouldn’t have been able to fit wearing a crinoline, hadn’t been invented in the Victorian period so that wouldn’t have been the problem. But as far as I’m aware, no provision was made. I suppose women would have just had to exert iron self-discipline. It was all part of being lady-like. But we do know that during the eighteenth century, when women wore hoops of whalebone – the precursors of the Victorian crinoline – they used to carry these beautiful little porcelain pots to pee in. I seem to remember someone coming on to The Antiques Roadshow with something they thought was a Georgian gravyboat, and it turned out to be one of these portable pissoirs…”

Tobin, who is a mine of information of this kind, divides historical underwear into two basic categories: that which was worn for reasons of hygiene, comfort or warmth, and that which was designed to shape the female form. Hoops and crinolines, which come into the second category, were constantly targeted by contemporary satirists and caricaturists, who saw them as among the more ludicrous excesses of the aristocratic vanity. In 1711, the Spectator complained about the fashion for hoops, pointing out that it meant only two or three women could now squeeze into the average drawing room and complaining that it was a cunning female strategy to keep men at arm’s length: “the Hoop Petticoat is made to keep us at a distance”. Thanks largely to the cartoons of men like Thomas Rowlandson and James Gillray, the premisses of the hoop-seller became known as “the bum shop”, while a multitude of nicknames were invented for the goods on sale there: “false rumps”, “culs postiches”, “fake bottoms”.

“Nowadays,” says Tobin, “people try on a dress and ask nervously if their bum looks big in it. But during much of the eighteenth century, and during the High Victorian period, when the false bottom came back into vogue, in the form of the bustle, you wanted your bum to look as big as possible. At the same time, you made your waist look as thin as you could by wearing corsets or stays, which would be laced up as tightly as could be managed. Overall, the look wasn’t very easy to achieve, because at the same time that this tiny waist was so admired, thinness of the kind sought by so many girls today was not admired at all. You were supposed to have a bit of meat on you. You’d want to have a big bust and hips. What the corset was doing, as well as displacing all that flesh, was pushing up the diaphragm and distorting the internal organs. You couldn’t get as much air into your lungs. One of the staff here at Killerton tried on one of the corsets to see how it felt. She said she could feel that her ribcage was being pressed in, and up, and she wasn’t able to breathe properly any more. She was having to take these short, panting little breaths, which is exactly what would cause you to faint.”

A similar experience is recorded in The Sylph, a novel written by Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, in 1779: “Poor Winifred broke two laces in endeavouring to draw my new French stays close … they are so intolerably wide that my arms are absolutely sore with them, and my sides so pinched! But pride feels no pain.” It is tempting to wonder whether the frequently hysterical behaviour of women in romantic novels of the Georgian and Victorian eras might have had something to do with the underwear they had on.

Quasi-anthropological explanations have been advanced for just why aristocratic women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries should have wanted to go about with wasp waists and huge artificial posteriors. “Some interesting research has been done at the University of Edinburgh which suggests that the fashion for hoops and crinolines may have been invented to focus attention on the waist, which is made to seem much thinner by comparison with what is beneath. It’s also a style which turns the figure into a sort of X, and by doing so focusses not just on the waist but the abdomen too, the child-bearing part of the body. So it’s logical that it should have become a focus of erotic interest.”

But there are also other, more mundane reasons for why the fashion took hold. Hoops and bustles were designed, in part, so that a woman might show off as much of her wealth as possible, enabling her to wear increasingly elaborate gowns made from great expanses of luxurious floral silks. “That is where the size of the false bum or bustle comes in. Size mattered – because the wider the hoop the larger the area you had to display your status and riches. Silks were labour-intensive to make, and the materials were extremely expensive too. Often they would use gold and silver thread for court dress, so you were literally wearing your wealth.”  The overall intended effect, a potent blend of sexiness, opulence and hauteur, is best preserved in art. Gainsborough caught it in his mid-eighteenth-century portraits of aristocratic femmes fatales. Nearly a hundred years later, Ingres caught it in his portraits of second Empire sirens and sphinxes like the National Gallery’s Madame Moitessier, reclining in acres of patterned silk.

The high artifice of hoops and crinolines, and the exaggerated female silhouette which they were designed to create, also provoked periodic counter-revolutions in underwear fashion. During the second half of the eighteenth century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s impassioned arguments about the decadence into which high society was falling, and his call for a return to “nature”, led to the sudden disappearance of the hooped dress. In France, the Revolution set the seal on the new fashion, since the last thing aristocratic ladies wanted to do during the years of the Terror was call attention to their wealth. As hoops fell out of favour overnight in France, the new and simpler style caught on in England too. Clothes became sheer and body-clinging, the better to show off the natural female shape, and there was a great vogue for high-waisted muslin dresses – the sort of garment, designed to make a woman look like a nymph or a statue, which Lady Emma Hamilton would have worn when she pranced about striking her famous “attitudes”. Because such clothing was so revealing, women began to wear knickers, or drawers, for the first time in history (previously, it seems, pants had been an exclusively male preserve). Initially distrusted, for the hygienic reason that they prevented the flow of air and caused rashes, they were soon universally adopted and so it was that Rousseau, author of Le Contrat Social, made his contribution to the modern undies drawer.

Most women had their drawers made by the same craftsman who made their chemises and smocks, the “lingere”, or linen-maker (although the ever-frugal Jane Austen made her own, buying lengths of linen for the purpose). White was considered the only decent colour for such clothes for a century and more. “Only ‘fast’ girls, like the sort who’d kick up their heels at the Moulin Rouge, went in for coloured drawers,” explains Tobin. But then the international couturier Lucile created the first wisps of widely available, lightweight, coloured “lingerie” in the early years of the twentieth century. They caught on, and women’s underwear was never to be the same since.

“Nowadays, we definitely have a far wider choice of what to wear under our clothes than ever before,” Tobin reflects, but she does not think that the brave new world of the Wonderbra necessarily makes life easier for most women. “Of course, you could say that corsets were terribly oppressive, and isn’t it wonderful that we don’t have to wear them any more. But they’ve just been replaced by other things. I suppose you could say that the natural look has won out over the artificial look, but has it really? The pressure now is to really work at it, and work out, and get the desired figure through diet and exercise – yet the desired figure is almost impossible to come by naturally, given that we’re all supposed to combine the tiny hips of an adolescent girl with the generous bust of a mature woman. So we’re not actually free, not really. In some ways I wonder if it’s worse. Many women would probably find it easier to put on underwear to keep the flab under control than find the time to go to the gym.”

So there you have it. As the great pioneer of French knickers, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, affirmed – admittedly in a non-lingerie context –  there is history but there is no such thing as progress. Women may have liberated themselves from the hoop and the crinoline and the difficult world of the portable pissoir – but their newfound freedom turns out, itself, to have been as transitory as Cole Porter’s glimpse of stocking.