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By the way - whatever happened to corsets? I've been wondering this for a while.
Like, a hundred years ago, people wore corsets like we wear bras. In the 1920s, stick-thin was fashionable and people used an awful lot of underwear to accomplish that, corsets and girdles and whatever. Stuff that you use to hold your tummy in. Same in the late 40s and 50s.
Then foundation wear got less popular towards the end of the 60s and was basically Right Out by the end of the 70s. But the expected body shape stayed. As in, you're definitely expected to be thin, or at least to have a flat tummy, but now you're expected to do it with diet and exercise, and no assertive underwear in sight.
I know that Slimming has been on the stage since - well, since the 20s anyway. But even so, no-one was expecting you to have a perfectly flat tummy without some assistance, were they? From what I understand, tummy-shaping garments were about as standard then as bras now. And then at some point we lost the assistance and expected everyone to have flat tummies with diet, bizarre exercises, and willpower.
So now everyone's supposed to beat up on themselves for not being able to accomplish unassisted what it used to take whalebone, steel, and industrial-strength elastic to attain. Sounds like bullshit to me, but I'd still be sort of interested to know more about how that happened - not so much why people wanted to wear less restrictive underwear (something of a no-brainer), but how we transitioned into thinking that you should have a flat tummy without it.
Like, a hundred years ago, people wore corsets like we wear bras. In the 1920s, stick-thin was fashionable and people used an awful lot of underwear to accomplish that, corsets and girdles and whatever. Stuff that you use to hold your tummy in. Same in the late 40s and 50s.
Then foundation wear got less popular towards the end of the 60s and was basically Right Out by the end of the 70s. But the expected body shape stayed. As in, you're definitely expected to be thin, or at least to have a flat tummy, but now you're expected to do it with diet and exercise, and no assertive underwear in sight.
I know that Slimming has been on the stage since - well, since the 20s anyway. But even so, no-one was expecting you to have a perfectly flat tummy without some assistance, were they? From what I understand, tummy-shaping garments were about as standard then as bras now. And then at some point we lost the assistance and expected everyone to have flat tummies with diet, bizarre exercises, and willpower.
So now everyone's supposed to beat up on themselves for not being able to accomplish unassisted what it used to take whalebone, steel, and industrial-strength elastic to attain. Sounds like bullshit to me, but I'd still be sort of interested to know more about how that happened - not so much why people wanted to wear less restrictive underwear (something of a no-brainer), but how we transitioned into thinking that you should have a flat tummy without it.
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