The shape of things...

For as long as I can remember, I have wondered about those little, stylised representations of ‘men’ and ‘women’, when in search of a public convenience. I always think about the stick figure with the skirt: do the majority of women look like this? Just recently, I was confined to bed and was reading through a bundle of magazines, when I came across a feature by a writer recollecting his maiden aunt who wore a salmon-coloured corset underneath her clothes, for all the days of her life. What puzzled him most was that his aunt, in his opinion, was in no need of such a garment because she was so skinny.
Ah, dearie me! I screamed with laughter as I remembered my Nanna and her attachment to her corset. Like all Victorian ladies, she had been put into ‘stays’ at an early age, then had grown up and old, that way. Size didn’t come into it. In her opinion, a lady was not properly dressed without a corset. Getting into the corset was a coming of age ritual for the Victorian girl, it seems. Sometime in her teens, her hair went up, her waist pulled in and her skirts down, giving her that familiar violin silhouette. It was all blown away in the roaring twenties, of course, but this bypassed Nanna as she lived in remote parts. She also missed out on the decades prior to the swinging sixties and as late as the nineteen seventies, she was worrying our Mum about putting my sister and I into corsets – I need not tell you what we thought of the notion.
Curiously, corsets have been called ‘foundation’ garments, as if the outer garments won’t work without the laced stays underneath. More curious still, while the lady kept her corset underneath her clothes, the Victorian tart is often portrayed with a laced bodice for an outer garment, coyly hinting at what is underneath. Even today, the corset is often used as a fetish, a symbol of femininity. Yet, few contemporary women actually wear one. When Madonna wore one for a stage act, she knew exactly what she was doing. And like the ubiquitous girl symbol outside public bathrooms, few women look like that.