April 2016 – Catherine McCormack

The V&A museum’s new show Undressed: A Brief History of Underwear reminded me of this article I wrote for Glass magazine back in 2010 http://www.theglassmagazine.com

sophia corset

The story of lingerie is the story of our relationship with the human body. Or, more essentially the female body, one that society has sought to tame and control, dress up, with parts covered, parts accentuated. And who can deny the alluring thrill of those whispers of silk, satin, chiffon, and nylon that quicken the pulse and retain the heat, shape, and scent of the body. Brassiere, teddy, corset, camisole, stockings, suspenders, baby doll; lingerie has an arsenal of delicate contraptions that wield much power. Lingerie is duplicitous. It tells lies about what’s underneath, it hurts, marks and punishes as much as it does favours, and of course, if it does its job properly, it doesn’t stay on the body for very long.

The term as we know it was introduced in the 1850s from the old French word for linen; ‘linge’, and referred to the chemises that were worn as a layer between the body and exterior garments, including the most evocative item of manipulative underwear which is the corset, (which takes it’s name from the Latin word ‘corpus’, meaning body). The task of this garment has forever been to manipulate and reconstruct the body, nipping in the waist to doll like proportions in the quest for the perfect hourglass figure. It was like this that aristocrats were rib-crackingly bound and starved of oxygen, Georgia belles like Scarlet O’Hara fainted in the hot sun of the deep south as did their Victorian counterparts, and swooning into some chivalrous arms became a matter of course.

The corset as we know it was an evolution of the severe and ubiquitous Elizabethan ‘stays’, a stiffened bodice, like an exoskeleton that in very name implies that the female body was too feeble to hold itself upright and required support. Actually putting on the garment itself required such assistance that such items and elegant bodyshapes were originally the preserve of the aristocratic before lingerie became more democratic.

The perversity of the corset is that despite the pain and restriction, its hold on the female body has never really been loosened. After a brief rejection in favour of the androgynous Art deco silhouette in the 1920s, with thrilling flashes of silky camiknickers and coloured garters with every Jazz age high kick, the sculpting, restrictive but oh so sexy corset returned as the uniform of Playboy bunnies and in the form of the ‘waspie’ that was essential for achieving Christian Dior’s New Look in the 1950s. Enter the Hollywood bombshell; Marilyn Monroe, Jane Russell’s curves; brazenly feminine in a glamorous post-war world of engineering that adapted to lift, separate and inspire the MadMen silhouette of conical bras and girdled hip that swaggered in kitten heels in every Manhattan office high rise.

Elsewhere on the big screen, Raquel Welch set the barometer for animal print’s enduring sexual allure in that bra and briefs in One Million Years BC, cutting a fine balance between glamazon and barmaid.

As sexual politics and issues of gender equality took focus in the 1970s, the cultural evolution of lingerie evolved in an era of extremes. In one camp the feminist movement burnt their bras, dismantling the symbols of female constriction and chauvinism while the other embraced an unbridled sensuality which still charges the retro fantasies of contemporary fashion campaigns today. Sarah Moon’s powdery soft focus in the 1972 Pirelli calendar references 1930s decadence and the speak easy bordello while Guy Bourdin’s notorious 1976 catalogue for Bloomingdales entitled Sighs and Whispers, elevated lingerie to an art form in scenes of satin-edged eroticism that is both surreal and smouldering in equal measure.

The 1980s and the protagonists of punk found that all too cloying of course, and lingerie emerged as a weapon of rebellion. Like the 1950s beforehand, austerity and recession produced an unapologetic, sexually overt aesthetic to celebrate counter-culture and get back to the earthy delights of the body. Punk girls wore bras on top of their clothes, combined with heavy boots, denim and leather as did Jean-Paul Gaultier when he reinterpreted the tea-rose girdles of the 1930s to create Madonna’s iconic Blonde Ambition look.

Eleri Lynn, Curator of Fashion at the V&A museum suggests that it was this trend in punk culture that informs the position of lingerie as part of our fashion lexicon today, when considering the current catwalk trend for underwear as outer-wear. She suggests that these origins lie ‘in the punk movement when Vivienne Westwood subverted overtly feminine symbols like corsets and bras and turned them into aggressive statements of empowerment.’

Silky slips as dresses, bras over blouses, and corset references on everything from T-shirts to party dresses have become staples of the current fashion trend as seen with designers from Marc Jacobs to Dolce & Gabbana and Bottega Veneta. In fact, John Paul Gaultier’s 2010 collaboration with La Perla has created a collection based on nude and black items that recall the irresistible Betty Page whose Southern girl innocence was tinged with just a little touch of bondage and resulted in explosive sexual allure. Just the right uplifting cocktail for right now when the coffers are empty and recession is nigh.

Lingerie is so much a part of our lives that it’s no wonder some brands became established household names. You’d have trouble finding a woman who didn’t own a Wonderbra in the 90s or indeed, a man who hadn’t slipped into some Calvin Klein boxers. Agent Provocateur designers Joseph Corres and Serena Rees received an MBE for services to fashion and contributed to a renaissance for all things burlesque and cabaret, creating fantasy worlds of sequinned nipple tassels and glamorous authority figures, granting women the liberty to fulfil their inner kinkiness without compromising on style and decorum.

A woman’s lingerie drawer constitutes a whole wardrobe in itself, and like any clothes, a cast of different characters she wants to be on any given day. As Christian Dior said in 1954 ‘Real elegance is everywhere, especially in things that don’t show…Lovely lingerie is the basis of good dressing’.

A version of this article will appear in the Summer 2016 edition of the St. Paul’s Girls’ School Review magazine.

Four years ago I found myself happily gestating my PhD research in art history at UCL, as well as my first child. What I didn’t expect was that one of the first universities to pioneer equal academic opportunities for women should in the twenty-first century provide so many obstacles to a new mother trying to obtain a higher degree. On the one hand these impediments were administrative and bureaucratic, for example any mothers who took a period of absence from research automatically fell into the category of ‘interruption of study’ as there was simply no option in the registry for ‘maternity leave’. This was despite the generous provisions for maternity pay by the bodies that fund doctoral research. The practical repercussions of this were devastating to my work- it meant a suspension of my UCL password and my rights to access the library, to consult on-line academic material, and even enter parts of the university. As a young mother it seemed that I was literally shut out of the ivory towers of the academy, but on an ideological basis it seemed that there was an even more urgent issue to confront, one of the apparent separation of the maternal and intellectual life and the implicit incompatibility of one to another that was suggested by the university’s discrimination. I was reminded of a since destroyed mural of ‘Modern Woman’ painted by Mary Cassatt in 1893 for the Women’s Building at the World’s Columbina Exhibition and Fair in Chicago. It depicted contemporary women plucking fruit from the tree of knowledge and science and passing it on to a younger generation. This and the barriers I was encountering in the university system made me think about the responsibility women undertake in order to create the next generation, some of whom will be academics and leading researchers, and how in doing so they should not have to sacrifice their own place in the academy. Despite progress in gender equality it seemed that we were still daughters of Eve, bound by our reproductive role and seemingly punished for an appetite for knowledge.

Disillusioned and frustrated I reached out to find other women in a similar situation, who had become mothers during their postgraduate careers. The response was encouraging and together we formed a group called Motherhood and the Academy (MATA) to raise awareness and put pressure on the university to reconsider how they provided for, or discriminated against maternity. In one event we formed a sit-in with our children, another was a pop-up play area in an exhibition space. Once our voices were heard I am happy to say that necessary revisions to policy and access have been made but academia and the rituals of the academic career still have a long way to go before mothers and the family are truly welcome.