“Everywhere when we place a foreign body in connexion with the surface of our body (for not the hand alone develops this peculiarity), the consciousness of our personal identity is in a certain sense transmitted into the ends and outer surface of this foreign body, and there arise feelings, partly of an enlargement of our personal ego, partly of a change in form and in extent of movement, now become possible to us, but naturally foreign to our organs, and partly of an unaccustomed tension, firmness, or security of our carriage.”[100]
Naturally the reciprocal influence of one person upon another is not wanting, and the observer believes that in the clothing he actually finds the body. Parts that otherwise would not have attracted attention now appear as important objects. For example, the tall hat, as a prolongation of the head, seems to give the latter a certain height and worth. Gustave Flaubert, in “Madame Bovary,” very beautifully describes this remarkable transition, this identification of clothing with the body:
“Beneath her hair, which was drawn upwards towards the top of the head, the skin of the nape of her neck appeared to have a brownish tint, which gradually became paler, and lost itself in the shadows of her clothing. Her dress spread out on either side over the chair on which she was sitting; it fell in many folds, and spread out on the floor. When he chanced to touch it with his foot, he immediately drew the foot back again, as if he had trodden on something living.”
The same association of ideas has led to the idea that clothing “is, as it were, a complete skin to man,” as if it must represent a kind of “ideal nudity.”[101] Clothing represents the person, shelters the nature, the soul. It can, therefore, become the means of expression of human peculiarities, of individual traits of character. There exists a “physiognomy” of clothing; it is a mirror of the physical and spiritual being.[102] Very rightly is it asserted, in a pseudonymous essay on the “Erotics of Clothing,” that clothing, in the course of the many thousand years of the development of civilization, has taken up into itself so much of the spirit of mankind that we should find a solution for all the problems of human civilization if we were able completely and immediately to understand the spirit of clothing. The form of clothing is at the same time also the most subtle and accurate measuring apparatus for the peculiar and personal in a man—for the individual in him.[103]
If the accentuation of certain parts is the first sexual stimulus of clothing the denuding of certain parts is the second. When once the custom of concealing the body has been introduced, the denuding of portions of the body has acquired a sexually stimulating effect which it did not previously possess, and which it does not now possess among primitive communities. In the saying of a thoughtful writer, that there is a great difference from an erotic point of view between a glance at the naked leg of a sturdy peasant girl and a glance at the naked leg of a fashionable young lady, this different conception of nudity finds very clear expression. There is, in fact, a natural, sexually indifferent nudity, and an artificial, erotically stimulating nudity. It is the latter only which plays a part in the history of clothing and of fashion; and it is this, in association with the erotic accentuation of certain portions of the body, which has from early times been cultivated for the allurement of men, and above all by the world of prostitution and by the half-world.
This first occurred in classical antiquity, to which, however, true “fashion” was unknown, because clothing was not then, as it is in modern times, fused with the body, and therefore did not appear to be a continuation and representation of the bodily personality. In general, the refined quality of the modern “mode” was lacking, in regard to the accentuation of particular parts of the body by means of clothing. Very aptly has Schopenhauer, in the second volume of his “Parerga and Paralipomena,” pointed out the thorough-going difference between antique and modern clothing in this relationship. In the days of antiquity clothing was still a whole, which remained distinct from the body, and which allowed the human form to be recognized as distinctly as possible in all its parts. Sexual stimulation could be effected only by the employment of diaphanous fabrics, which were preferred in the circles of the half-world and by effeminate men. Varro, Juvenal, and Seneca chastise with biting words this immorality of “coacæ vestes,” and of the network clothing imported from Egypt. Then there appeared for the first time as a peculiar type the woman in man’s clothing, a proof of the wide diffusion of the love of boys, on which those prostitutes who went about clothed as men must have speculated when they assumed this dress.
The analysis of clothing into upper-clothing and under-clothing signifies a differentiation of clothing very effective as regards erotic influence. For the first time could the individual portions of the body appear in definite significance in relation to the body as a whole. And the indication of the waist became characteristic of fashion in clothing.[104]
The analysis of clothing was carried a stage further in the separation of clothing, properly speaking, from that which lies beneath it, the more intimate covering of the body, the washable underclothing—shirt, chemise, petticoat, etc. More especially had this differentiation a great erotic significance. It was the increase in the number of individual articles of clothing which first gave rise to the erotically tinged idea of the gradual “dressing” and “undressing,” to the idea of the intimate “toilet.” The possibilities of disclosure, half concealment, and semi-nudity were notably increased, and a much larger playground was opened to the erotic imagination.
In association with this, the waist, especially in the case of woman, indicated a separation of the bodily spheres into an upper sphere, associated chiefly with the intellectual, and a lower sphere, belonging rather to the purely sexual.
“The waist, which is already, roughly speaking, indicated by the sash or girdle, but which, in consequence of the progressive differentiation of feminine clothing, comes to play a principal part in women’s dress, divides the woman’s body into thorax and abdomen. The fully clothed woman becomes an insect, a wasp, with two sharply defined emotional and sexual spheres, with a heavenly and an earthly division.”[105]