OF ALL THE WOMEN who have ever tortured themselves for fashion, Scarlett O'Hara was the one who made it seem most romantic.
She was a fictional character, to be sure. Yet her creator, Margaret Mitchell, made us want to believe in Scarlett. Here was a woman who, when life seemed to be going against her, just tightened her corset and set forth to "vanquish fate" with her appearance. From the first chapter of "Gone With the Wind," Scarlett's shape bears witness to her superior powers:Her new green flowered-muslin dress spread its twelve yards of billowing material over her hoops and exactly matched the flat-heeled green morocco slippers her father had recently brought her from Atlanta. The dress set off to perfection the seventeen inch waist, the smallest in three counties.
What could be more romantic? How could such a woman fail to win Ashley's love? How could the South possibly lose the Civil War?
Whether or not they ever changed the course of history, or "vanquished fate" with their appearance, legions of women did dress like Scarlett did. They trussed and corseted themselves, constraining their rib cages to the point of deformity. To further dramatize the difference between waist and torso, they also hooped their hips or bustled their behinds.
We haven't seen such shapes for a century, yet Mary Farahnakian has not forgotten these women.
Farahnakian teaches costume history and design at Brigham Young University. She can point to four distinct periods of corseting in European and American history - times when tough underwear was what it took to look good.
Farahnakian was the faculty adviser for the annual BYU student fashion show this spring. Her task was to help students execute their original designs, but also to create her own designs for students to manufacture.
In the collection she designed herself, Farahnakian took her shapes straight from history. She calls her designs "constructional underwear."
Word got out around the campus, she says, when her students began sewing underwear for the fashion show. There was more than a little anxiety about the specter of women in Madonna-like corsets parading on stage at BYU. "But then they saw that this was very modest. Underwear in the older times is completely different from lingerie today." Ladies of yesteryear wore long linen pantaloons under their petticoats, for one thing.
Far from being shocked by what they saw, Farahnakian says, her audience was fascinated. Seeing these pieces of construction helped the audience appreciate the length to which women would go to reach their desired silhouette. "Their delicate skin . . . those metal cords . . . how could they tolerate it?"
Other basic questions arise. How did they sit in hoop skirts? Mostly they stood, says Farahnakian. Or danced. Large hoops were for party wear. During the day, women achieved fullness through petticoats, which were easier to sit on. How did they walk through doorways or negotiate around furniture? At the height of the Victorian era, when hoops were 8 feet in diameter, builders began constructing larger doorways, says Farahnakian. Could they bend over? Not easily. A dropped hanky was a major problem. A hooped lady did need a gentleman or servant in attendance. How did they breathe in those tight corsets? They carried smelling salts, but still they swooned a lot, says Farahnakian.
When they were rehearsing for the fashion show, she corseted one of the models too tightly. After about an hour, "we almost had a fainting."
There has been some national interest in her "ironwear," Farahnakian says. She hopes to take the collection to an international conference of textile and fashion professors being held in October in Minneapolis.
Farahnakian went to great lengths to find historically accurate fabrics for her collection. She used metal stays and hoops in her designs, because Farahnakian says metal was used in underwear throughout history.
By contrast, Georgina O'Hara's "Encyclopedia of Fashion" stresses whalebone. O'Hara says corset stays were almost exclusively constructed from the whales' upper jaw. From 1855 to 1866, when the crinolines, or hoops, were most popular, the demand for whalebone was helping force whales into extinction. O'Hara says metal replaced whalebone in the late 1800s.
O'Hara traces the history of corsets to the 15th century, when two pieces of linen were first pasted together to enforce a trim shape. In the 17th century the "body," as it was called, was further stiffened with whalebone. In the 18th century, says O'Hara, rows of whalebone or cane were sewn into a piece of fabric. The stay-filled corset was wrapped around the body, laced at the back.
Fashions were freer in the early 1800s, but firmed up again by Civil War times. The tightly laced shape stayed in vogue into the 20th century.
Farahnakian was born in Iran. In two previous BYU fashion shows, her designs were heavy on Middle Eastern fringe and tassels. Even in the underwear collection, her colorful heritage asserts itself. "Always I see my background. It comes through automatically."
Western people always talk about "matching" colors. Says Farahnakian, "My clothes are not matching. Who cares?"
If she brings a foreign perspective to her designs she also brings a detached perspective to the fashion history of the Western world. She doesn't necessarily see stays and corsets as instruments of patriarchal political oppression. Nor does she laugh at the women who wore them.
And lest we laugh at women who would submit themselves to such torture, Farahnakian reminds us what modern women are willing to suffer for fashion. She points to liposuction, breast augmentations, cosmetic surgery. Women of yesteryear may have tried to change their silhouette with steel underwear. But today's woman, she points out, will submit to surgery to change her silhouette.
Farahnakian wonders, "In the future are they going to be in sympathy with us, with what we do to be good looking? Who is going to laugh at us?"