No 160

"How the Waist was Won" by Hal Appleton

Kodak Girl with Hawkeye Stereo

 Viewers of daguerreotype collections are often surprised to discover female nudes, feeling somehow that figure photography is a recent phenomenon. Leaving aside a myriad of classical paintings done long before Niepce and Daguerre came on the scene, one can go back to the cavemen for such depictions. But, since women forever have apparently been trying to modify the shape they were born with, the illustrations weren't always of nudes.

 Evidence comes from drawings scratched onto bone in the Neolithic Age showing women wearing...corsets! Cave drawings from 20,000 years ago found in Norfolk, England show women wearing bodices of animal hide, laced down the front and fastened around the waist with skins. Suffering for a slim waist didn't start with modern history. What women did earlier than that has not been discovered, but you might safely guess that things weren't any different. Men suffered, too. We know that many a Regency beau, like the obese Prince Regent in the early nineteenth century, creaked and sweated inside stays that would have killed lesser men. There are no pictures of the men in their corsets, thank heaven. At least not here.

 The ideal was to produce as small a waist as possible without actually killing the wearer. The constriction produced women who were seen to be frail and weak and subject to fainting without outward provocation. One wonders how the race survived.

 Picturing women in corsets, however, is as old as photography...and with never a lack of willing models. Indeed, corsets come and they go in waves of fashion, with the latest being the Victorian age, when photography swelled with the heyday of the corset. Some of the sights from that era can still make a strong man faint.
 
 View these at your own risk. #
 

CUTLINES:

 1   The photographer of this waistline ca.1900 had to be courageous indeed, to get the shot  and duck before any laces gave way. Jack Naylor Collection
 
2   The Kodak Girl, with a No. 2 Stereo Brownie around 1910. Lew Regelman collection
 
3   Le Rire, 1890, “Billiard Game”. Note the photographer with a box camera in the  background. Jack Naylor Collection
 
 
 

No 158

No 140-141

Last Modified 9-11-02

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