Fashion and Fetishism

Corsets, Tight-Lacing and Other Forms of Body-Sculpture

David Kunzle

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780750938099
• eBook ISBN: 9780752495453
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Fashion Design

Presenting the history of corsetry and body sculpture, this edition shows how the relationship between fashion and sex is closely bound up with sexual self-expression. It demonstrates how the use of the corset rejected the role of the passive, maternal woman, so that in Victorian times it was seen as a scandalous threat to the social order.

NOTES

Preface

1. E.g. Hélène Roberts. Cf. my ‘Response’ ibid.

2. The review by Lisa Vogler appeared in Feminist Studies, vol. 2, no. 1, 1974.

3. Haller p. 151.

4. Institutional prejudice may be illustrated with an anecdote from costume authority James Laver’s autobiography (Museum Piece, pp. 242–3). A lady came to Laver, then (around 1930) Keeper of the Department of Prints and Drawings at the Victoria and Albert Museum, to propose the sale of her ‘psychologist’ husband’s collection of ‘fetishist material, admirably arranged and classified. All the pictures were of excessive tight-lacing and excessively high heels.’ Laver proposed a paltry £10, advising her to find a private collector with more to offer. Which she did. Comments Laver: ‘A curious moral problem arises. I had helped [sic] a poor widow, deprived the Museum of an interesting collection of material, and promoted somebody’s private vice’ [sic]. The incident prompted a Great Thought, which has borne fruit in the chapter ‘Frou Frou and Fetishism’ in his latest book (Modesty in Dress): ‘I was visited that night by a Great Thought … Fashion is the comparative of which Fetishism is the superlative.’ Thus, a Superlative Vice provoked a Great Thought.

5. An exception is the demonic possession conjured up by Oskar Panizza’s short story Der Korsetten-Fritz. The (perhaps deliberate) banality or matter-of-factness of Pauline Reage’s best-selling Story of O does not, in my view, rise very much above the average level of fetishist correspondence.

6. Bibliographically I have drawn heavily upon the Index to the Library of the US Surgeon General’s Office, which is, however, demonstrably incomplete. That the corset should be honoured with a separate classification in a catalogue published under the auspices of the US Army may be explained by the fact that William Alexander Hammond (1828–1900) was Surgeon-General from 1862 to 1864 when the Library was first formed. This controversial but distinguished specialist in nervous and mental diseases sponsored George Scott’s Electric Corset (advertisement of 1883 reproduced in Rudofsky, 1971, p. 119).

7. E.g. Marjorie Worthington in her recent biography of the popular anthropologist William Seabrook. Gerald Hamilton in his autobiography Mr Norris and I, discusses his resemblance to the fetishist hero created by Christopher Isherwood in Mr Norris Changes Trains, without even mentioning the fetishism.

8. British Library, New York Public Library, Victoria and Albert Museum Library, and Library of Congress.

Introduction

1. Cole, p. 17.

2. Havelock Ellis, who should have known better, called the ‘foot-bandage’ of the Chinese strictly (his stress) comparable to the ‘waist-bandage’ of the West (1910, III, p. 22).

3. Cf. Maurice North for a malignant view of this relatively benign form of fetishism.

4. Cf. Rachewiltz, p. 129. There may be a connection with algolagnia. Cf. ‘Her belt had left a red mark around her waist; she looked as if she had been flagellated’ (Montherlant, p. 29). Isak Dinesen saw the marks in a more poetic light: ‘… with her waist still delicately marked by the stays, as with a girdle of rose-petals’ (p. 13). Erotic massage is suggested by Harsanyi (p. 226): ‘In the evening as she undressed … she rubbed the reddish weals on her skin just as cosily as her mother.’

5. The fantasy lives more in the minds of the reformers than in those of the fetishists. Cf. Germaine Greer, a scholarly, if hardly impartial, source, who believes that removal of the lower rib was customary (!) among tight-lacers (The Female Eunuch, pp. 34–5). One wonders about the podiatrist’s prurient glee at the ‘sex-scars and pleasure wounds’ resulting from the ‘not uncommon’ incidence of women having ‘their little toe amputated to be able to get the foot into a smaller shoe’ (Rossi, p. 181).

6. In his Waste-Makers (1960, p. 87) Vance Packard reports this analogy between waist-making in fashion and cars: ‘Fins began jutting up as stylists sought to push mid-sections lower and lower.… The analogy between this squashing effect and tight-lacing of the waist and expansion of the skirt is almost irresistible. The tail fin is a last resort of over-extension, an outcropping that quite seriously serves much the same purpose as the bustle or train.’ Industrial designers have succeeded in infiltrating erotic wasp-waists elsewhere. Raymond Loewy, creator of the Coca Cola bottle, described it as ‘the bottle with the hourglass figure’.

7. 1878 Cartoon: L. Bechstein in Fliegende Blätter, V. 69 (1878), p. 15. prison: Butin, 1900, p. 23, citing The Lancet.

8. I, p. 171. The fetishist confessions seldom stress asceticism in any orthodox religious sense. As an exception: ‘My aunt herself insisted on lacing her, and as my sister occasionally appeared uncomfortable, my aunt, who was a Puseyite [the High Church movement that revived ancient doctrines of penitence] would say in a severe tone of religious admonition: “My dear child, if your corset hurts you at all, suffer it for the love of God"’ (Seeker).

9. ‘The Girls’ by H.A.B., Judge, 5 December 1885, p. 10.

10. ‘Brauttoilette in Wiener Caricaturen, 22 March 1890, p. 3 and ibid., 1 March 1890, p. 5.

11. It was translated (over considerable opposition) into English in 1892. The various enlarged editions absorbed specialist studies such as that by Binet, first in the field with a monograph in 1888.

12. Stekel, II, p. 350.

13. ‘Aversion therapy’ is sometimes euphemised as ‘negative conditioning’. D.F. Clark in 1963 ‘cured’ a patient of his addiction to a woman’s girdle by inducing vomiting while he was wearing it, hearing tape-recordings of its delights, and looking at related pictures. Vernon Grant in 1953 records a case of a man who was arrested and jailed merely for following high-heeled girls in the street; his photograph was even published in the newspapers. Masturbating boy: Los Angeles Free Press, 6 April 1972.

14. The psychoanalytic method entered costume theory through Flügel, whose pioneering Psychology of Clothes (1930), with its brilliant synthesis of sexual, sociological and economic determinants, has had a profound effect on two leading costume historians of our own day, C.W. Cunnington and James Laver, and has yet to be superseded. Flügel saw sexual and hierarchical principles as mutually supportive, and it is the interplay of these principles that is illuminated by the study of sculptural fashions.

In the 1960s a number of popular paperbacks on fetishism appeared, by Carlson Wade, Hugh Jones and, notably, Dr Harvey Leathem, with much entirely unverifiable case-material.

15. Henry Murger, 1852, p. 146

16. Cf. Rossi, who, however, overemphasises the sexual to the virtual exclusion of all other factors in the folklore of foot and shoe.

17. Rossi, p. 5.

18. E.g. ‘She had a temptingly small foot, giving tokens of the excellent smallness of the delicious slit’ (The Pearl, 1879, quoted by Pearsall, p. 71).

19. Voiart in 1822 (p. 286) believed that a well-arched ins...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction: The Special Historic and Psychological Role of Tight-lacing
• One: From Ancient Crete to Neoclassicism
• Two: Revival of Tight-lacing
• Three: The Campaign of the Humorists 1846–1900
• Four: The Final Phase 1860–1900
• Five: The Corset as Erotic Alchemy
• Six: The Victorian Fetishist Experience
• Seven: Fetishism Deepening
• Eight: Unfashionable Fetishism: London Life 1923–40
• Nine: Postwar Fashion and Media Exploitation of Fetishism
• Ten: Expanding Universe
• Eleven: The Corset Revival of the 1980s–90s
• Twelve: The Tyranny of Slenderness
• Thirteen: Dreaming in Film
• Conclusion: Civilised and Primitive Body-sculpture
• Appendices
• Notes
• Bibliography