Adapt clothes to the body, not the other way around

meLooks like it’s time to revive the short skirt garter. Bear with me, this is not an argument in favor of the micro-mini, but rather a plea to remember the ideals of an organization, aka the rational clothing movement, which argued that clothing should serve the wearer, and not upside down.

Women may have ditched the bony corsets and Victorian undergarments that, in some cases, weighed as much as 14 pounds, but sometimes you have to wonder if we’re making progress.

We know the deeply corrosive effect of the cult of thinness, but here we are again talking about the return of wafer-thin models to the high-profile catwalks and, even worse, remembering the ‘heroine chic’ of the 1990s, that awful term. which glorified pale skin and gaunt features.

Let’s hope we’re too drug-conscious, if not body-conscious, to allow that harmful tendency to take hold, though there’s little doubt that thinness is back, if ever gone. The hot item on this year’s stunning runway was not a dress, but a flat stomach, to quote fashion editor Jess Cartner-Morley’s wry observation.

“The red carpet was won not by a dress, but by a body,” she wrote from the Council of Fashion Designers of America awards in New York earlier this month. As she pointed out, actress Julia Fox wore a cut-out dress that was mostly cut-out, with a side dress order. The star of the show was her carved midsection, visible ribs, and muscular glutes.

The model Bella Hadid had an impact on this.  Image: Julien de Rosa/AFP via Getty ImagesThe model Bella Hadid had an impact on this. Image: Julien de Rosa/AFP via Getty Images

The same thing happened at Paris Fashion Week when fashion label Coperni sprayed a white dress onto model Bella Hadid’s body. She walked on stage in a pair of skimpy boxers and stood for 15 minutes while a team from fabric technology company Fabrican sprayed the contour of a dress onto her body.

To be fair, it was a magnificent trick. And it offered a tantalizing sci-fi peep into the future of fashion. The spray dress was made of blended wool, cotton, nylon, and cellulose. She evaporated when she made contact with the body, leaving behind a non-woven fabric.

Could we be buying sprays instead of clothes in the future?

It is also true that the catwalk is to everyday fashion what the north pole is to the south, a world apart, but it still wields power.

The spray dress hack might have paid off as a timely showcase for sustainable fashion, but at its core, the lingering image was this: a nearly invisible dress on a nearly invisible body. It pains me to comment on another woman’s shape, but it’s important to speak up when fashion focuses its scissors on the body rather than the fabric.

That’s why I wish the short skirt garter would still exist. It would be fascinating to get the perspective of women who fought against the restrictive nature of clothing. They may be amused to see that the worry is no longer about too many clothes, but too little.

However, they would surely be horrified to see that now, instead of cutting cloth to fit our bodies, we are tailoring our bodies to fit the cloth.

However, they may have something to teach us.

Let me introduce Belfast-born dress reformer and “Victorian troublemaker” Florence Wallace Pomeroy. She was born at Malone House in Belfast in 1843 and became Lady Harberton when she married the 6th Viscount Harberton just before her 18th birthday in 1861.

A few decades and four children later, she became a leader of the Short Skirt League, an organization whose members hiked their skirts an outrageous five inches. It was a vital fashion concession for women to enjoy cycling, then increasingly popular.

Florence was a great cyclist and encouraged others to enjoy the sport. Her campaign made headlines when the owner of an inn in Surrey, UK, refused to serve her because she was wearing her “rational” cycling outfit of baggy bloomers. Florence sued but she lost her case because she had been served in another room. However, the advertisement garnered a lot of public support.

In 1883, Florence was one of the leaders of the Rational Dress Society, which protested that tight corsets, high heels, and heavy skirts prevented women from exercising.

Charlotte Wilde, Oscar’s wife, was also a member. In a lecture to the society in 1888, entitled Clothed by Our Right Minds, he said that women should be allowed to wear “split skirts” because, as God had given women two legs, they should be free to wear them.

The Rational Dress Society also argued that women unencumbered by limping fashions would be much freer to participate more fully in society.

Florence Wallace Pomeroy: member of the Rational Dress Society.Florence Wallace Pomeroy: member of the Rational Dress Society.

If you think all of that is old, this is what resonates so loudly today. “The Rational Dress Society,” ran their rallying cry, “protests against the introduction of any fashion in dress that deforms the figure, impedes the movement of the body, or tends in any way to injure the health.”

Florence and her members fought against the dominance imposed by the Victorian corset and crinoline, but at least they were dealing with an outside force: clothing design.

In recent, and supposedly more progressive, times, fashion has done something much more sinister by targeting the design of the body itself. The fact that size zero became a thing is due, in large part, to a fashion industry that designs clothes (low-rise jeans, microminis, crop tops) that look good only on the skinny and curvy.

If you were born that way, embrace your natural form. Most of us, however, aren’t but have internalized the message that fashion favors the lean.

EITHERr, to use the words of those Victorian sages, we have embraced a fashion that “distorts the figure” (think dieting to fit the LBD this Christmas), “impairs body movements” (think what happens when the LBD diet fails) and “tends to harm health” (review the first two parentheses).

There has been a welcome move away from the tyranny of thinness. We’ve seen a rise in plus-size models (to follow) along with a vocal body positivity movement.

Here again, however, is a return to the runway and the body image fallout that is sure to follow. Have no doubt about it; these images will certainly have an impact. Keep an eye on TikTok and see how today’s runway craze translates into tomorrow’s weight loss hashtags (and eating disorder misery).

It is true that fashion is cyclical. It was only a matter of time before the bad old YK2 trends came back to haunt us. And to return to the wisdom of the Wildes, Oscar this time: “Indeed, what really is a fad? A fad is simply a form of ugliness so absolutely unbearable that we have to change it every six months!

Clodagh Finn’s new column, An Irishwoman’s Diary, begins Saturday December 10 in the Irish Examiner.

Source: news.google.com