Shake What Your Mama Didn't Give You: Shapewear Through The Ages
Back in the Renaissance, men sculpted their bodies with padding: Fake calves, paunches, doublets that puff up a man to twice his size. And nothing says power like a codpiece. "It's a reproduction of the men's sex, and it's a sign of virility and wealth, too," Bruna says.
Attached to the front of a man's pants, shown off with his robes thrown open, a man's codpiece was his signature. "It was not only the fashion at court — it was a fashion from all the classes, from the nobleman to the simple one," Bruna says. There were even rules stating how big anyone's codpiece could be!
We humans love our physical assets — and we love to show them off. The U.S. undergarment business nets over 13 billion dollars annually, according to the market research firm Ibis. Which brings us back to our psychologist, Nikkii Adams. Before she started her daily corseting, she spoke to her doctor about wearing one — it does not, she says, move her organs. And she knows just what to tell the critics who say it's too much, it's too ridiculous.
"It is too much," she says. "And I love it. Because it does give you a very remarkable, different look. I want to walk into a room and have everybody say, 'Oh, my gosh, what is she doing?'"
Now, we can't say how happy her female forebears were to be corseted from cradle to grave. But you can get a hint of what it was like at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery in New York City, where "Fashioning The Body: An Intimate History of the Silhouette" runs until July 26.
Web Resources
"Fashioning The Body"
Fashion