The Egyptians and Arabians consider this ludicrous rotatory motion a great fascination, and have a special name for it—Ghung.
But Fashion, the handmaid of ugliness, is not content with aping the bad taste of Arabians and Egyptians. It goes several steps lower than that, down to the Hottentots. The latest hideous craze of Fashion, against which not one woman in a hundred had taste or courage enough to revolt—the bustle or “dress-improver” (!)—was simply the milliner’s substitute for an anatomical peculiarity natural to some African savages.
“It is well known,” says Darwin, “that with many Hottentot women the posterior part of the body projects in a wonderful manner; they are steatopygous; and Sir Andrew Smith is certain that this peculiarity is greatly admired by the men. He once saw a woman who was considered a beauty, and she was so immensely developed behind, that when seated on level ground she could not rise, and had to push herself along until she came to a slope. Some of the women in various negro tribes have the same peculiarity; and, according to Burton, the Somal men ‘are said to choose their wives by ranging them in a line, and by picking her out who projects farthest a tergo. Nothing can be more hateful to a negro than the opposite form.’”
Evidently “civilised” and savage women do not differ as regards Fashion, the handmaid of ugliness. But the men do. While the male Hottentots admire the natural steatopyga of their women, civilised men, without exception, detest the artificial imitation of it, which makes a woman look and walk like a deformed dromedary.
THE CRINOLINE CRAZE
The bustle is not only objectionable in itself as a hideous deformity and a revival of Hottentot taste, but still more as a probable forerunner of that most unutterably vulgar article of dress ever invented by Fashion—the crinoline. For we read that when, in 1856, the crinoline came in again, it was preceded by the “inelegant bustle in the upper part of the skirt”; and it is a notorious fact that cunning milliners are making strenuous efforts every year to reintroduce the crinoline.
In their abhorrence of the crinoline men do not stand alone. There are several refined women to-day who would absolutely refuse to submit to the tyranny of Fashion if it should again prescribe the crinoline. One of these is evidently Mrs. Haweis, who in The Art of Beauty remarks that “The crinoline superseded all our attention to posture; whilst our long trains, which can hardly look inelegant [?] even on clumsy persons, make small ankles or thick ones a matter of little moment. We have become inexpressibly slovenly. We no longer study how to walk, perhaps the most difficult of all actions to do gracefully. Our fashionable women stride and loll in open defiance of elegance,” etc. And again: “This gown in outline simply looks like a very ill-shaped wine-glass upside down. The wide crinoline entirely conceals every natural grace of attitude.”
Another lady, writing in the Atlantic Monthly (1859), remarks concerning the crinoline: “A woman in this rig hangs in her skirts like a clapper in a bell; and I never meet one without being tempted to take her by the neck and ring her.”
About 1710, says a writer in the Encyclopædia Britannica, “as if resolved that their figures should rival their heads in extravagance, they introduced the hooped petticoat, at first worn in such a manner as to give to the person of the wearer below her very tightly-laced waist a contour resembling the letter V inverted—ʌ. The hooped dresses, thus introduced, about 1740 attained to an enormous expansion; and being worn at their full circumference immediately below the waist, they in many ways emulated the most outrageous of the fardingales of the Elizabethan period.”
“About 1744 hoops are mentioned as so extravagant,” says Chambers’s Encyclopædia, “that a woman occupied the space of six men.” George IV. had the good taste to abolish them by royal command, but they were revived in 1856. The newspapers of two decades ago daily contained accounts of accidents due to the idiotic crinoline. “The Spectator dealt out much cutting, though playful, raillery at the hoops of his day, but apparently with little effect; and equally unavailing are the satires of Punch and other caricaturists of the present time against the hideous fashion of crinoline.... Owing to its prevalence, church-pews that formerly held seven are now let for six, and yet feel rather crowded. The hoops are sometimes made with a circumference of four or even five yards.”