The Heritage of Dress: Being Notes on the History and Evolution of Clothes

by Wilfred Mark Webb

Although there is a tendency to abolish stays, it does not, of course, prove that on occasion they may not be of use. Mr. Heather Bigg, the well-known surgeon, who is a specialist in cases of spinal curvature, and who adopts mechanical means of treatment,[57] is in a position to offer an opinion on the use of corsets, as he uses special ones as precautionary means of support and where curvatures may threaten, as well as to be safeguards against relapse after the mechanical treatment of a curvature has been consummated. In one of his books he has much to offer in favour of the corset, and at the outset it may be well to say that Mr. Heather Bigg’s remarks are mainly directed against the views of the practitioner who, from the treatment that he advises, is called a gymnastic practitioner, and who, according to Mr. Heather Bigg, goes further than attacking matters of treatment, and in order to popularize his own practice endeavours to entwine with it revolutions that shall extend even to the simplest garments. For instance, the gymnastic practitioner maintains that corsets are detrimental to health.

Mr. Heather Bigg’s opinions practically are those with which most sensible people would entirely agree. The arguments which he brings forward in favour of them are not, however, very conclusive, as we hope to show. Corsets, he says, are intended in their right and proper use simply to stay and support the body in its natural shape, and not to mould it into funny forms according to the vagaries of fashion. The women of classic times did not use them for this purpose. On the contrary, they had no reason to do so, as their flowing garments did not permit them to display the outlines of their figures; they therefore simply wore corsets because it had been found by centuries of experience that they were conducive to health and serviceable in exertion.

His description of the original corset of Greece and Rome will show to what ancient form of stay the modern corset may be traced. The arrangements of the ancients consisted of three pieces, and these were worn either together or separately, as required. They consisted of supporting bands worn round the body in a way very similar to the “putties” worn for support round the legs by the present-day soldiery. The main and most useful portion of the corset was a zone, or loin band. Then there was the thoracic band, or strophion, intended to uphold the breasts and conserve the figure. And, lastly, there was the waistband, which filled up the space between the other two. It is from the conjunction of these triple bands that the modern corset has been evolved, as it is worn by women of every class throughout civilized Europe to-day. What was made before in three pieces is now simply manufactured in one.

Now let us consider the reasons given by Mr. Heather Bigg as to why “women of all dominant and civilized races always wear, and with advantage have worn, some binder or corset”; and again, why the whole history of the world shows that extraneous support is beneficial. In the first place, Mr. Heather Bigg says that in primitive and aboriginal races that practically wear no clothes, the girls may be perfect in form when they arrive at their full growth, but that they are, as a rule, “hideous objects of disfigurement after their first child.” The inference is that civilized women retain their beauty in later life owing to the fact that they have worn stays. On the other hand, the fact that the native girls lose their beauty must, according to the argument, be because they have not worn stays; but surely this can be compared with the fading of a flower or its changing colour after fertilization, and is rather due to the absence of any conditions or kind of selection which would tend to preserve the woman’s youthfulness. Besides, we need go no farther than our own country to find cases where married women gradually lose their beauty, and the Welsh and Italian women proverbially age rapidly.

The wearing of belts by navvies when they are doing heavy work is possibly a precautionary measure against strain, but it does not refer to the race as a whole, and one would take it that when it is said that Elijah girt his loins in order to run before the chariot of Ahab, it simply means that he fastened up his flowing garments. To the second question as to history showing that extraneous support is beneficial, Mr. Heather Bigg says that the answer is simple even if Darwinian. He may claim that the “if” saves him, though unintentionally, for in his argument he seems to ignore the main principles of evolution. He says, first of all, that it might just as well be asked why any clothing whatsoever should be found requisite by civilized mankind. He claims rightly, and so far he is in keeping with Darwinism, that man, according to his obvious mechanism and morphology, is a creature built on the quadruped pattern. The word is spelt “quadrupled,” though presumably this is a printer’s error; but he goes on to say that this building was done with the intent that his body should be horizontal instead of vertical. Of course, the body of the original quadruped was horizontal; but in the course of evolution such changes were made as enabled man to occupy an upright position. Mr. Heather Bigg talks as if it was an intentional act on the part of man when he says that he “managed to rear himself in a permanently erect position, and as he has chosen the upright position, so he has to experience some of the penalties attached to it.”

The state of affairs is this: man became perfectly well fitted for an upright position, and his internal organs were arranged quite properly for progress on two legs instead of four, although Mr. Heather Bigg claims to the contrary. What may be the case is, that natural selection no longer acts to keep man as perfectly constructed as he was, or to improve him, and some human beings may need support, owing to weakness or the undue development of their bust, just as those of us who suffer from short sight and bad teeth take advantage of eye-glasses and the skill of the dentist. We think it hardly time yet to say that all women need stays, any more than that we all need eye-glasses or should be provided with false teeth at a certain age.

Summing up the matter, when human beings take up work for which their bodies were not specially evolved, or when they wish to do things which at one time all human beings could do, but which, through the cessation of the action of natural selection, they are not now able to do, then they want help. This would explain why our soldiers when marching in South Africa found puttees so useful, as Mr. Heather Bigg maintains.

The case of dress brought forward by Mr. Heather Bigg is exactly a case in point. We have seen in the opening chapters of this book that man has lost his hairy covering, and, so far as cold climates are concerned, we must agree with Mr. Heather Bigg that it has been found by experience that clothing is necessary for healthful warmth. All the same, we should like to see some experiments tried to show whether even now it might not be quite possible to exist in this climate with little or no artificial covering. We do not agree at all with the statement that as man “has reared himself from four legs on to two, so he has found by similar experience that some sort of bandaged support is required in order to assist an abdominal mechanism that is inadequate for biped progression.”

In order to prove that the gymnastic practitioner is wrong when he says that corsets are injurious to health, Mr. Heather Bigg brings forward the results of experiments made by Professors Roy and Adami, which he says scientifically prove stays to be distinctly beneficial. These experiments were described at the British Association Meeting in 1888, under the title of “The Physiological Bearing of Waist-belts and Stays,” and the effects of these contrivances were tried not only upon men, but upon animals. It was shown that a gentle compression of the abdomen caused a greater flow of blood to other parts of the body, and conduced in consequence to an increase of mental and muscular activity. The experimenters do not seem to have waited to see whether in the course of time these effects were or were not obtained at the expense of the digestive organs, but they concluded that they had directly explained “the beneficial and extensive use of some form or other of waist-belt by all nations that had passed beyond the stage of absolute barbarity.”

The theory has been advanced that stays are derived from swaddling clothes, and that the custom has survived in the case of women alone, for we may neglect the occasional use of such garments by men in the past at the present time, for, judging from advertisements in the papers, their use is not confined to the fair sex. There seems, however, little evidence in support of this theory, and inquiry from a lady who has lived a long time in Palestine has elicited the information that while swaddling clothes are still in use in the Holy Land, stays do not form a part of native dress.