HIGH-WAISTEDNESS

Peigne d’Or. Fichu-Centure, from Journal des dames et des modes, Costume Parisien, An 7, 17 aout 1799. Hand-colored engraving, 19.9 × 11.9 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Perhaps the defining characteristic of neoclassical dress is its distinctive, high-waisted silhouette. Emerging first around 1793, by 1800 waists became so high—or as contemporaries usually termed it, “short”—that some extant garments have busts measuring only 1½ inches (fig. 79). Cinched with threadlike drawstrings or ribbon tapes, these short waists transformed the fashionable silhouette. On the one hand, a high-waisted dress turns the body from an hourglass into a column, recalling caryatids on Greek temples, and the white textile and gathered skirt can accentuate this architectural effect on a tall, slim body. On the other hand, high-waisted dresses cling to the curve of the belly and thighs while emphasizing the breasts, evoking (and accommodating) the fecund maternal body. In either case, the high-waisted dress addresses a woman’s body as a three-dimensional organism.

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Fig. 79. Cotton muslin dress with cotton embroidery (detail), ca. 1800. Indian textile; dress fabricated in England. Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Shortening the waist paradoxically evoked both mother and child. Babies and young children of both sexes had worn white cotton frocks for decades, as the young grandson of John Tait does in a portrait by Henry Raeburn from 1793 (fig. 80).1Baumgarten 1986, pp. 70–75. While the two subjects of this painting share an intellectual connection and reciprocal gestures, hinting at a common masculine identity and family resemblance, their attire sharply differentiates them by age and status: the grown man in somber black, the little boy in loose and unsexed white. Adult women had been similarly differentiated from their children in earlier decades, but when women embraced the chemise dress in the 1780s, they began instead to resemble their children, as Lady Lavinia Spencer does in a portrait by Joshua Reynolds with her young son (fig. 81). Comforting him after a bumped head, Lady Spencer wears a version of her son’s infant attire: both wear white muslin dresses with ruffles at the chest. The pink sash wrapped around his torso echoes the pink petticoat visible underneath the luxuriously transparent Indian muslin of her skirt. But the high-waisted neoclassical dresses that emerged around 1793 resembled infants’ gowns even more closely. Thomas Lawrence’s portrait of Lady Templetown and her son (fig. 82) portrays them as if interrupted in a tête-à-tête. Surrounded by a moody and Romantic natural setting, their bodies mirror one another with similarly small, cropped heads, intertwined hands, and high-waisted white gowns with short, puffed sleeves and open necklines. Indeed, in Louis-Léopold Boilly’s well-known family scene of around 1803 (fig. 83), the women, girl, and baby all wear very similar white muslin gowns with drawstring necks and short waists. All are differentiated from the smartly tailored adult man, who wears dark colors, riding boots, and one glove, as if he’s just come in from outside. In a sense, then, the high-waisted white dress of the 1790s infantilized women, erasing distinctions of age, status, and even gender, as she came to resemble the unsexed body of the genderless child.

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Description: John Tait and His Grandson by Raeburn, Henry

Fig. 80. Henry Raeburn, John Tait and his Grandson, 1793, with additions ca. 1800. Oil on canvas, 126 × 100 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

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Description: Lavinia (Bingham), Countess Spencer, and John Charles Spencer, Viscount Althorp,...

Fig. 81. Joshua Reynolds, Lavinia (Bingham), Countess Spencer, and John Charles Spencer, Viscount Althorp, later Earl Spencer, ca. 1783–4. Oil on canvas, 147.3 × 109.9 cm. Huntington Art Collections, San Marino, CA

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Description: Lady Mary Templetown and Her Eldest Son by Lawrence, Thomas

Fig. 82. Thomas Lawrence, Lady Mary Templetown and her Eldest Son, 1802. Oil on canvas, 215 × 149 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

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Description: Painting of a Family Game of Checkers by Boilly, Louis Léopold

Fig. 83. Louis-Léopold Boilly, Painting of a Family Game of Checkers, ca. 1803. Oil on canvas, dimensions unknown. Private collection

But as the high waist emphasized the bust and clung to the belly, it also stressed the fecund and maternal aspect of the female body. It reshaped all bodies into the ideal of the pregnant body, giving the appearance of heavier breasts and haunches, a thicker waist, and a rounded belly, while also releasing women from the pressure of stays. Indeed, in many ways it appropriated the “negligence” in dress allowed to pregnant women for all fashionable women, claiming the healthy, “natural,” fertile body as a fashion ideal.2Maternity wear in the eighteenth century consisted mainly of a greater social tolerance for loosened stays and the wearing of wrapping gowns, robes volantes, and other quasi-”undress” in public settings. Stomachers, which normally covered the stays and drew a robe together in the front, and which were the most highly decorated parts of a formal ensemble, could be left off and the gap camouflaged with a long fichu.

By de-emphasizing the difference between the pregnant and the non-pregnant fashionable body, neoclassical dress also allowed women to participate more easily in public life throughout their pregnancies. As nursing one’s own children became fashionable for elite women, neoclassical dress also accommodated this with ease. Indeed, it is important to recall that some of the most fashionable women of the 1790s were pregnant more or less constantly: Thérésa Tallien, for example, had ten children, and gave birth in the years 1795, 1797, 1800, 1801, 1802, and 1803—all during her most high-profile period as a fashion icon.3See Bourquin 1987 and Kermina 2006.

New undergarments were invented to support this new bodily ideal. The Telima Patent Corset (fig. 84), for example, instead of flattening the bust and molding the torso into a cone, as had earlier eighteenth-century stays, included cups to accommodate rounded breasts and a buckled midsection beneath to support them, much like a modern brassiere. Lightly stiffened with bones in the center front and center back, the high-waisted corset also included an attached pad at the rear, to encourage gathered trains to flow elegantly from the high waist (fig. 84). Advertising text for this corset stressed its “concord of art with nature” and its encouragement of a woman’s freedom and movement, as it “puts forth a new display of Taste and Elegance, ever pliantly exciting and retaining the GRACEFULNESS of THE FORM. It guides on principles of Nature the Freedom of Deportment, acting up continually to the perfection of Movement and Attitude.”4Advertisement in The British Press, Tuesday, June 11, 1805. Even as it recalled the ideal of art in the form of her body, invoking “Attitudes” and “Taste,” this corset was presented as merely supporting, pliantly, a woman’s natural form, grace, and physical mobility.

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Description: Telima Patent Corset, front and rear views by Mills Junr.

Fig. 84. Mills Junr., Telima Patent Corset (front and rear views), ca. 1804. English; cotton and silk. RISD Museum, Providence

By the end of 1795, the short waist and the body it described had become the norm in fashionable London and Paris, to the point that the long-waisted fashions that persisted in less cosmopolitan foreign capitals seemed deforming: “The long shapes of the foreign figurante, have the appearance of absolute deformity, when compared with the Grecian zone, now adopted by our lovely countrywomen,” one commentator opined in London.5Anon., The Oracle (London), December 24, 1795, n.p. For this writer, the high waist was simultaneously “natural” and beautiful, “Grecian” and British, exemplifying the progressive and elevated taste of his home country and placing this style in the context of other fashionable Hellenisms. Such elision also positioned Britain as the inheritor of classical achievement, contributing to the constructed genealogy of “Western Civilization.” A few years later, the short waist was acclaimed as a great invention in the “science of costume,” with one periodical crediting Lady Charlotte Campbell with its invention: “It is scarcely fifteen years,” wrote La Belle Assemblée in 1809, “since Lady Charlotte Campbell was the most distinguished ornament of the fashionable circle”:

To a great share of beauty she united the most brilliant accomplishments, and a taste in dress which excited the admiration and envy of the female world. Her Ladyship will always maintain a conspicuous place in the records of fashion: the time in which she flourished will, if we mistake not, be celebrated as a kind of AERA [era] in the decoration of the female world. It is perhaps unnecessary to inform those female readers who are possessed of experience in the science of costume, and can count the revolutions of fashions with accuracy and precision, that Lady Charlotte Campbell was the first inventor of what is technically called short waists. This peculiar attraction of the sex will long be remembered by those who have so often shuddered at that martyrdom which beauty has sustained from whalebone and tight lacing.6La Belle Assemblée; or Bell’s Court and Fashionable Magazine (London), no. 46 (June, 1809), p. 167.

The story of how short waists were introduced to London fashion by Lady Charlotte Campbell, however, is a complicated one, and it begins with a padded belly. This is the story of our third chapter.

1 Baumgarten 1986, pp. 70–75. »

2 Maternity wear in the eighteenth century consisted mainly of a greater social tolerance for loosened stays and the wearing of wrapping gowns, robes volantes, and other quasi-”undress” in public settings. Stomachers, which normally covered the stays and drew a robe together in the front, and which were the most highly decorated parts of a formal ensemble, could be left off and the gap camouflaged with a long fichu. »

3 See Bourquin 1987 and Kermina 2006. »

4 Advertisement in The British Press, Tuesday, June 11, 1805. »

5 Anon., The Oracle (London), December 24, 1795, n.p. »

6 La Belle Assemblée; or Bell’s Court and Fashionable Magazine (London), no. 46 (June, 1809), p. 167. »

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