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Tuesday 23 July 2013

Women Dresses 2013

Women Dresses 2013 Biogarphy

Source(google.com.pk)
Corsets, tightlacing, high stiff collars and other "trappings" of lady-like dress also signified discipline and self-denial to some Victorians. It upheld their belief in putting up a courageous appearance while enduring pain; it appealed to the Victorian fastidious neatness and preoccupation for the meticulous. The high stiff collars were symbols of status especially when they were immaculately starched, smoothed and spotlessly white. The collars were usually 8 cm (3 1/4") in height and were usually for day wear, but it left a "high water mark" when the ladies changed into their low neckline evening gowns. Such was the concern for a perfect stiff collar that an Englishwoman in India, worried about going around with a limp collar, fashioned one with metal rings cut out from food cans, thus holding it upright. <28>
A Victorian writer defended lady-like dress as such:
All slatternliness or meanness of attire marks some intellectual deficiency. Some men of genius have, we suppose, been slovens, but it is not the genius which is represented by his costume, but those defects and disorders in him. which have prevented his genius from doing all it might have done. . . . There is the sense of bracing up for an occasion; to be comfortable and self-forgetting is to be deshabille. <29>
It was the Victorian woman's social duty to look beautiful and respectable. In the midst of such an intense moral climate, Victorian upper-class school girls aged five to ten were urged and sometimes bullied into wearing corsets. It was not only seen as a way of disciplining the child in neatness and decorum, but also of preparing the girls for marriage. The marriage market had become extremely fight by the 1850s and, according to fashion historian Willet Cunnington, a tiny waist and marriage became the two main Victorian female concerns. <30>
Cunnington was not exaggerating, for there were a good number of Victorians who perceived that a tiny waist was the symbol of beauty and femininity; some Englishwomen even saw the corsets as a symbol of "independence." The writer Charles Reade best described this general trend of thought in his novel A Simpleton. The heroine proudly refused to discard her corsets when the hero implored her to. She taunted him into courting a submissive "Circassian slave" who never wore corsets or stays and would be willing to answer his every beck and call. <31> Clearly Victorian ladies were very confident about their cultural superiority. Lady-like dress represented, to them, high culture, beauty and discipline. Some would even go to great lengths to endure pain; the "morning pip" like opium would be taken to relieve pain and physical stress and tightlacing; <32> thus, it created the standard Victorian notion of femininity and beauty: an anemic "panting dove." <33>
In the 1840s Punch magazine was relentless in its satirical attack on lady-like dress. Each edition devoted some space to debates, with pictorial caricatures, on both lady-like and "rational" dress. Opinions written by readers were often heated and thought provoking which showed that the general texture of Victorian psychological make-up was a fascinating mixture of sexual repression, ethnocentrism, and an ability to laugh at themselves.
There is not a man among us ... not being a born fool ... that does not hate, detest, abominate, and occasionally swear at the sinful suicidal fashion of tightlacing, which is every whit as frightful a personal disfigurement as the squeezed skulls of the Flat-heads, or the crushed feet of the Chinese. <34>
Corsets and tightlacing to some dress reformers were seen as devices that "mutilated" women; not only did these beauty devices reshape the body, they were believed to have caused miscarriages, the birth of inferior babies, illnesses and even licentiousness. "Medical theorists" argued that this made blood become "impure and corrupt," caused "disease to the brain," and inevitably led to "impure feelings." "Weak-minded" ladies were, therefore, easy preys of temptation. <35> The pedestal on which Victorian women were placed had unfortunate consequences: women were perceived as innocent, that is devoid of any "animal feelings like sexual love; her "special nature" made her a trusting, giving and warm person; but her perceived lack of intellect could make her a prey to sexual seduction. Once introduced to the sins of the flesh women's "animal" feelings would be insatiable. <36> Ingrained with such negative traditional views of women, it seemed right that Victorian professionals like Dr. Acton would seriously believe that corset wearing led to masturbation; a late 19th century Victorian medical thesis on sex and the corset was more explicit:
The early wearing of stays is said to cause precocious sexuality. When it is known that a degenerate cult of tight corset wearers exists in England with a journal devoted to their craze between tightlacing and sex hyperaesthesia [heightened feeling] seems to be well established. <37>
Reports of women having ribs extracted so that they could fit into tiny corsets were unfounded since there is no evidence to support the claim. Like any controversial topic of the time, there were exaggerated and false claims to make the situation seem worse than it actually was. <38> Claims of corsets and tightlacing causing abortion is, at best, debatable. Apart from Emile Zola's graphic story from his novel Tylicka where a young servant girl who died tragically after the "birth" of the fetus, there is no evidence of Victorians using corsets as a means to abort. <39> Special corsets were made available for expecting mothers; it may be possible that tight corset wearing by some expectant mothers could have led to complications, but it would be prudent of us not to conclude with surety that corsets were the cause of miscarriages. <40>
After 1850 the racial degeneration argument was strongly argued by social Darwinists. They contended that fragile and "wasp" waisted women would generate a debilitated race. Women, as a result, could no longer fulfill their natural, maternal roles because of the pernicious habit of compressing their stomachs. Their histrionics went as far as to suggest that England would be filled with a new inferior race. <41> It was a widely held belief that the coarse working poor were in danger of taking control from the weak middle-classes. <42> Darwinists also argued that "rational" dress made a civilized and intelligent society; they claimed that anthropological studies of primitive cultures proved that "backward" and "barbaric" people wore meaningless ornaments like bangles, bracelets, earrings, and the like. These dress reformers argued that ladies' dress should evolve to the "superior 'rational' men's standard." <43> Mrs. E. M. King, secretary of the Rational Dress Society, was influenced by this trend. In her book entitled Rational Dress: Dress of Women and Savages she likened "savages" to fashionable women. <44>

Women Dresses 2013