King Minos Charmed By The Embryonic Corset II

( Originally Published Early 1900's )

What her name may be in Minoan I do not know. Let us simply call her Marjorie. Dressed as has been described, with the pronounced bust and hips and the wasp waist of a fashionable eighteenth century figure, she is on her way to the Minoan Circus. Her costume is even more unlike that of classical times than her escort's. This young gentle man's attire consists principally of a belt tightly confining his own graceful waist and a waistcloth tautly folded about the loins, with the addition of a conspicuous codpiece.

The Minoan Circus, we find, is not exactly like Barnum and Bailey's or Ringling's. Cretan social life, we have already discovered, is filled with public games and contests. Attendance at the Circus is a religious duty as well as a pleasure. Many ladies are present here. A number of them have their breasts protected by supporting sheaths—an elementary form of brassiere.

The principal event seems to be a ritualistic sport termed "bull-leaping." The snorting bull before us is monstrous and very decoratively spotted. The vaulting youth, whose hazardous performance on the program apparently is a somersault over the bull's back, is fearsomely confined at the waist, though otherwise unencumbered, by a broad belt which has the effect of a heavy metal ring. In a manner—and in a very firm manner, at that—this lad is certainly corseted.

Two lithe damsels harry the bull. They have quite flung off flounces. These dainty feminine figures dart about free of all, draperies. Happily, we have ringside seats. So we get a good closeup of the fascinating corsets which constitute the costume, almost altogether, of these fair bull baiters.

It won't do simply to call these articles, as has sometimes been done, "large and very tight belts." They are certainly more intricate than that. A rigid-looking ring, built in tiers with a somewhat protruding tier at the top, grips the waist. An ornamental extension from this compresses the abdomen and buttocks, with a taut fabric over the hips. Altogether, except that it is more formidable at the top, this snugly encompassing structure which moulds these dewy feminine figures baiting bulls on the shores of the Aegean Sea strikingly suggests the smart device known to us as the girdle.

Viewing ladies attired only in such corsets, how do we feel? That is, how do we feel about the ideas of the New Gymnosophy, of which we have heard? This school of thought, we suddenly recall, says that by accentuating some of "woman's secondary sexual characteristics"—diminishing the size of the waist, thus in effect increasing the proportions of the pelvic and thoracic regions—the primary object of the corset is to increase the physical sexual appeal of the human female. In relation to that pronouncement, the peculiar thing here is a physical characteristic of the Minoan men, who also naturally have very small waists which they emphasize artificially. Undoubtedly, however, to our sophisticated sensitivities, these corseted ladies have a piquancy which they would not have with their "secondary sexual characteristics" unaccentuated.

When not at sporting events, Minoan Marjorie attends garden parties, among other social activities, and she is frequently at the temple. The garden parties rather suggest a charming scene from Victorian England. An array of fragrant feminine figures dots the lawn. They wear fresh-looking frocks, large around the bosom, sharply cut in at the waist, with somewhat bellshaped skirts of ankle length. There is no indication of the limbs beneath the skirts, which flare out rather stiffly as they descend, suggesting the possibility of a Minoan form of Hetherbloom petticoats.

At the temple we pause with Minoan Marjorie before a small gold and ivory statuette. It is perhaps six and a half inches in height. Marjorie's religion is a form of nature worship, and this figure represents a Cretan snake goddess.

In addition to the curls usual to Cretan femininity, the deity wears an elaborate coronet ornamented with gold attachments. Standing proudly erect, with outstretched hands she firmly grasps two gold snakes whose tails coil about her arms. Her bare bosom is imposing; otherwise she is slim. Her strikingly neat waist is snugly bound with a hefty gold ring. Thence downward, the first flounce of her skirt tightly sheathes her hips, abdomen, and buttocks quite as in the silhouette with which we are familiar. The five flounces of her rather narrow full-length skirt are banded with gold.

Again, the connoisseur of the feminine figure immediately notes that, in this sculptured representation done with exquisitely realistic craftsmanship, the manner in which the skirt falls hints nothing of the limbs beneath. The effect is round. No book mentions possible undies beneath the flounces of the Cretan lady, with such a genius for fore-shadowing fashion. None even speculates upon the matter. And our acquaintance with the ladies among whom we find ourselves is so distant that we may not inquire into this. But, again, we cannot but suspect petticoats here, perhaps a couple of them. At any rate, in the mode affected by popular snake goddesses.

The history of costume shows that only when a race had evolved a smooth and regulated pattern of living did it give any attention to garments worn under outer clothing. One thing apparent enough is that this goddess, for all her fondness for snakes, is highly civilized. Yet we can only conjecture that she has on some sort of underwear. She represents the ideas of a cultivated, an obviously fastidious people, a society even frivolous in its taste for the amenities of visible dress.

Further than this, as we have noted in the striking spectacle of Minoan Marjorie accompanied by her young man, it is a society in which piquancy of social intercourse is deliberately enhanced by having the sexes arrayed in costumes as dissimilar as ingenuity can devise. And just such a sophistication of sex consciousness makes for a differentiation in underwear. So, altogether, it seems very likely that these Minoan ladies had thought of some conceit of froufrou beneath as well as upon the flounced outer dress.

The feminine fashions in these sparkling isles, we perceive as we continue to look about, are astonishingly various. And our wonder grows at the phenomenal ingenuity, intuition, of these strange Cretan ladies who seem to have anticipated so many sophisticated ways of making the figure more alluring—ways rediscovered only after many centuries.

Most 0f the ladies in skirts go barefoot. Their feet, like their hands, are long and delicately tapered. In some cases very trim, high boots are worn, coming halfway up the gracefully modeled calf and with pointed toes somewhat turned up. The lasses who have thrown off their skirts show a striking flair for the fetching. The corset-bedecked figures in the bull spectacle, which Mr. Earl Carroll might have directed, were saucily tipped with boots.

With certain dresses several kinds of hats are worn. We see one the shape of a truncated cone and almost twice the height of the face. Another, flat and trimmed with rosettes, presages a type not unknown in Europe in the sixteenth century. But three things most particularly arrest our attention.

Some thousands of years later, as we traverse the social scene, we shall become intimately acquainted with a curious contrivance in underthings called the bustle, a caprice of Fashion which flourished most outrageously in the eighties of the last century. Some of the Minoan skirt silhouettes decidedly suggest the bustle—a contour attributable less to Nature than to Art.

More than this, the long bellshaped skirts at times assume a magnitude akin to the most artificial phenomenon in the long pageant of Fashion—that monstrosity of repeated incarnations variously known as the farthingale, the hoop, and, finally, the crinoline of more than 3600 years later. These Minoan antecedents of Renaissance and Victorian feminine vanity are, curiously enough, apparently ceremonial dress or ritual costume, as we hear them called "votive robes." It would appear that the worshipper dedicates to the gods clothes actually worn during the rite or little models of them in painted clay or porcelain, as memorials of the act of worship. The private worshipper who takes part in a festival evidently is expected to offer something. Thus we see many dainty little models of votive dresses in the temples and at the shrines. They frequently bear elaborate decorations of crocus flowers or other beautiful designs.

Most remarkable of all is a thing about which, curiously enough, hardly anything has been said. But it is a fact that on our little visit back here to this Aegean isle maybe twenty centuries B.C., we get a very modern eyeful indeed. A note quite common to the Cretan scene is a fashion which less than a year ago, early in 1933, was a sensation of the century—an innovation (so it seemed to us at home) distinctly of our own day. Within historic times, it was first heard of (outside the Orient) from the direction of Hollywood. Pants for women!

The Minoan lady's pants, however, are not identical with those supposedly donned first by Marlene Dietrich at the outset of that mannish episode in her career, as reported in some quarters at the prompting of her manager and publicity expert, Mr. Harry Eddington. Almost simultaneously, however, with the news of Miss Dietrich's trousered urge, fashion commentators reported in New York newspapers by wireless from Paris that Lyolene had opened the summer fashion offensive with mannish Oxford trouser suits having double-breasted jackets and sleeved striped shirts for "country wear." And before long indubitable trousers for feminine sports wear had appeared in the United States on the links at such fashion resorts as Pinehurst, North Carolina.

The Minoan ladies we have had the felicity to observe at their sports had, indeed, cast off their trousers and appeared as open to intimate observation as twentieth century lasses at strenuous play. Miss Dietrich, of the peerless feminine charms, carried trousers from sports wear all the way to formal evening attire, with some followers. During the little flurry that followed a few young ladies in trousered suits for afternoon town wear were seen on Broadway and on Fifth and Park Avenues—to the indignation, it was reported, of elderly gentlemen and generously proportioned women. Observers more smartly minded and modeled were heard to describe these pants as "the duckiest thing you ever saw."

The Minoan lady's pants, while highly ornamental, are not precisely what you would call "ducky." Certainly that is not what she would term them. You see, with us the piquancy of out-and-out trousers for the fair resides largely in our perception that they are "mannish." Our fashions had been playing in this direction for some time. There was the "boyish bob" . . . the "can-opener" figure, with the straight sharp lines of a lad . . . later, "sculptured" curls, a note harking back through the centuries to suggest a Greek youth ... the "tailored" hat . . . and so on. The occult propulsion behind all this, of course, is the perpetual desire to freshen feminine charm.

This quenchless desire is perhaps necessary for the continuance of the race, but in the trend of our recent fashions just cited some minds psychologically inclined might detect a touch of decadent perversity. For instance, however unconscious of the idea a young woman in sculptured curls herself might be, what is the historical implication, it might be asked, of giving her the allure of a Greek youth? As to pants a la gigolo (and their duckiness), some engaged in the Fashion industry averred at the advent of this vogue that femininity was but accented in adapted male attire.

At any rate, the trousered Minoan lady is perforce quite innocent of any affectation of "mannishness," as her escort is frequently satisfied with merely a shirt or tunic and is never "tailored" beyond a loincloth or very short kilt. Indeed, as every schoolchild knows, trousers for men were not known to really fashionable people until nearly two thousand years after the Society scenes we are visiting at the moment.

We recall the more or less wild curiosity around last February when "everybody" was wondering what women were going to do about this portent pointing to an unprecedented revolution in feminine fashions. A number of New York's famous style creators apparently were inclined to predict a rage for the new idea. In smart circles, at any rate. The fashion, however, got sat on not only by the average woman but by the very great.

The illustrious Mme. Elsa Schiaparelli, Paris couturiere, who three years before had shocked London by wearing divided skirts on the streets, and whose pajamas had first won recognition for her designing ability—Schiaparelli denounced the mannish pants vogue as "too frightful for words." She, together with her most eminent colleagues—Patou, Jane Regny, Lyolene, and Worth, refused to honor trousers except for beach wear or active sports.

A compromise, however, was offered. "Trouser Vogue Starts French Skirt Division" and "Divided Skirt Tempers Fad for Trousers"—so ran headlines on Paris fashion correspondence. The skirt-trousers were cut circular and, except that from the knee they fell in folds and altogether were somewhat more "feminine" (as we'd say) in effect, resembled the ample, gay trousers of the dashing Minoan woman.

The Minoan pants somewhat suggest, too, the most colorful patterns in modern beach pajamas. Indeed, we might at moments be tempted to call them pajamas. But pajamas, beginning as sleeping garments, have their origin fixed by history in a very different time and place. "Divided skirts, or very wide pantalettes"—so the garments are described in one of the very few learned works which note their presence in this sparkling civilization—the first civilization on the northern side of the Mediterranean Sea, existing before written pages of history. Pantalettes, with their frilled Victorian connotation to which we are accustomed, seems a rather quaint designation here.