3. Why Girdles Became Unfashionable
The articles that have recently appeared about girdles coming back into style always seem to insist on the fact that they're talking about new exciting girdles that are like biker shorts (Oh great!) and that aren't like the things "your mother wore." Well, I suppose they need to do this for a generation that didn't think what their mother wore was sexy (as we did). But the fact that companies are making new kinds of girdles that really are girdles is an indication that the basic essence of the girdle is sexy. I read an interview somewhere with the designer Josie Natori, who essentially said as much (she makes fabulous new girdles, rich with reference to the old styles.) Tight, smooth garments are always considered sexy by men, and women have always felt sexy wearing them, for the way in which they look, and for the way they feel.
If this is the case, it's hard to understand why they haven't been more consistently and recently popular. The comfort factor cannot have anything to do with it. Since when have women cared that much about comfort when they want to look good? High heels, tight jeans, all of these things young women like to wear are obviously much more uncomfortable than most girdles. I think several things have contributed to the bad image girdles have acquired over the past twenty-five years.
First of all, as I remember, girdles went out of fashion for one fundamental reason: it was difficult to keep them hidden under mini-skirts. Around 1968, when I entered college and almost all of my girlfriends still wore girdles, it was the era of the long-leg panty girdle. These just didn't go with mini-skirts, although we all wore them anyway, and no doubt the guys all had a voyeuristic ball (my husband confirms this, and he thinks it has a lot to do with his own fascination with women in girdles).
You remember. You considered yourself lucky if only your stocking tops were showing. Ironically, we didn't forsake the long-leg panty girdles because if they showed, it was at least more modest than showing the actual garter and bare skin. I certainly felt this way. Of course, I didn't have the fashion guts at that time to wear my skirts at a dignified length.
So to solve the problem, pantyhose was invented. Pantyhose were understandably popular because they didn't show and the convenience ofnot having to deal with garters was appealing to women. But they didn't shape the figure. The invention of pantyhose therefore caused many women to consider the question of why they needed to shape their figures. When they considered it, they must have realized that a basic reason, perhaps the basic reason, for girdling young, slim women was the sense of modesty. I'm sure that this was part of the reason why my mother insisted that all four daughters wear them all the time, (as I've said, she didn't hold a gun to our heads, but we just wouldn't consider not going along with this very firm unwritten rule).
Although many of my slim girlfriends didn't need a girdle to shape themselves (I always did), they wore girdles so that someone walking behind them would not see them as what my mother called "sloppy." They would not, in other words, bounce back and forth in a way that men could find sexually suggestive. Well, in 1968 and 1969, people were beginning to worry less about being sloppy or immodest. I'm sure many men liked it if a woman, to use the terminology of the period, "let it all hang out." So the freedom to not wear girdles was in a large way part of a different sexual aesthetic made possible by the sexual revolution, an aesthetic that stressed that the less you inhibited the natural form of the body, the sexier it was, because it was closer to what was thought to be sexiest of all: nudity.
If you think that bouncing around and being nude is sexy, then you inevitably feel that not bouncing around and being contained is repressed. Girdles became associated with what was thought to be the sexual repression of the 1950's and early '60's. This false association is based on an assumption which also distorts our view of the Victorian period: the belief that prudishness is effective in suppressing sexual energy. I think that the reality is that the prudishness of a period forces sexuality to sublimate itself into all sorts of creative sign-making, especially in dress, which may explain why the clothing of the Victorian period and the fifties and sixties is so erotic.
Sure the period 1950-65 was prudish, and sure, a young woman would feel that she was a slut if she had sex, but that hardly means that sexuality was effectively repressed. I remember that period as being far more sexually charged than the world of today, and it's not just that I was younger. There was the constant erotic charge of all the gender difference and all of the elaborate play of symbols of gender difference. Sexuality was not expressed by rolling nude in the mud and having orgies. It was expressed by wearing girdles and petticoats, by dating, and flirting. Sure it looked less like actual sex than what came later, but it was arguably more intense because of that.
4) The association of girdles with repression is particularly easy because they cover the genital area and are hard to get off or out of. So one can make a facile analogy between them and chastity belts. I'm not saying that they didn't provide a certain protection in certain dating and necking situations. But that didn't mean that the young lady encased in the girdle wasn't feeling anything. In fact, I know that I, and my sisters, and my girlfriends, would invariably wear our tightest girdles on dates. The ostensible reason was that we wanted to look our best for our dates. But I don't mind admitting to you now what I knew then, but would never have admitted to anyone back then: since dates always involved some degree of sexual arousal, whether or not there was necking or petting involved, my sexual arousal was intensified by my tight girdling. And I loved that. And to be honest, I wouldn't have loved it as much if what I was wearing underneath was easier to get off. I would have felt more vulnerable.
So the irony is that, far from repressing us, our girdles offered us the opportunity of intensifying our pleasure while protecting our virginity. This was not, in retrospect, a bad thing. And it is entirely different from repression. But because the generation after us only seems to recognize intercourse as appropriate sexual expression, they can only see girdles as obstacles.
Another major aspect, as I see it, of the discrediting of girdles was the belief, associated with the sexual revolution and related to the valorizing of nudity, that any form of unnaturalness in dress was bad. Artificiality itself came to be seen as suspect, even though it is an unavoidable feature of all art, culture, social interaction, and, I think, sexuality. Wearing girdles, like all forms of dressing up, was seen as somehow equivalent to lying. You weren't being "yourself." You were being "formal" rather than "casual," "fancy" rather than "down-to-earth," pretentious rather than "real."
I can't stand the smug Puritanism with which people who don't like to dress up look down on those who do. I long for a world in which not everyone believes that one is only truly oneself if one is "flopping" comfortably in some non-public place. Girdles, involving as they do a sacrifice of some comfort for an artificial beauty and elegance, are more suited to a world in which people can understand why it might be fun to dress up and be formal, to look at others and have others look at you.
Continue to Girdles And The Decline And Revival Of Romance
Copyright 1995 by Suzanne. Used with permission of the author.
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Originally Posted April 20, 1997