Suffering for beauty

 My father once told me that you had to suffer for beauty. This in response to my complaints about the rollers I had to put in my hair overnight, secured with stiff plastic pins. Evidently it was a time when large curls were required. This was the day after hair had to be dead straight. To solve that problem was less painful but much more awkward. Hair had to be either ironed (long hair that is – I doubt the iron treatment worked with short) or wrapped round the head and secured with bobby pins.

Ah, fashion. Even in our suburban fastness we yearned to be up to date.

In the 1950s – and maybe into the very early ‘60s – we wore flared or dirndl skirts held up by layers of petticoats some of which had rope sewn into them to keep them stiff-ish. This was usually topped by a twin-set and pearls. Twin-sets, for the uninitiated, were tight little short sleeved, crew necked jumpers topped by cardigans in the same colour. While pearls finished the outfit, I suspect that was only for our mothers; we may have worn a string of beads but memory doesn’t serve me here. These flaring skirts were just the ticket for rock and roll; in any movie or tv show of the period you’ll see expanses of white petticoats as the girls were thrown back over the boy’s arm. I can’t quite remember if the Bodgies and the Widgies preceded the Rock ‘n’ Roll culture but the flared skirts were in there somewhere.

Into the '60s we suffered for beauty another way. I recall wearing very, very tight trousers made from furnishing fabric with zero stretch, decorated with large florals. They were so tight that you had to stretch out on the floor to pull the zipper up. I rather think the same solution was required for the earliest denim jeans.

As the ‘60s progressed skirts suddenly became shorter and shorter. By the time I turned 21 in 1967 the skirts were so short they should have come with matching undies. There was a parallel fashion called “hot pants” which were shorts of extreme shortness. I still possess somewhere the outfit I wore for my 21^st (a party, by the way, which I absolutely hated as I loathed being the centre of attention). This outfit was a ridiculously short skirt with a little sleeveless top. The fabric was beautiful but honestly, I can’t imagine that I ever wore this. I have also kept a pair of hot pants with beaded turnups, shorter than some swimmers!

Australia’s short skirt history was ushered in by the scandalous appearance at the Melbourne Cup in 1965 of English model Jean Shrimpton in a dress daringly cut to four inches above the knee. This garnered an extraordinary amount of publicity. And while talking British models, do you remember Twiggy of the waif-like stature and the black-ringed eyes who looked for all the world like a famine victim.

Needless to say, short skirts eventually gave way to long skirts; if they reached mid-calf they were midi-skirts or maxi-skirts if they reached the ankle.

And a moment’s reflection on undergarments. After the dirndl petticoats left the fashion stage we went to the slim fitting “slip” as they were called, made of silk or synthetic with very narrow straps. Interestingly, girls’ school uniforms – sleeveless with box pleats usually – were called gymslips; as Americans might say: “go figure!” Your underwear drawer always contained full slips and half-slips just for skirts and I rather think the occasional long slip to wear under evening clothes.

Evening clothes in the ‘60s and probably into the ‘70s always included several long dresses. These were de rigueur for events like weddings or balls. Custom had it in those long-ago days that you needed to have your arms covered for dining, then you could be sleeveless for dancing. So evening dresses often had a small jacket or bolero made to match. I recall also having cocktail dresses; not sure how they were defined but they were always short. If you turned up to a function in the wrong length clothes you were utterly humiliated.

Although I was extremely thin in the Olden Days, I along with all other women in the ‘50s and ‘60s wore “step-ins”, very thick elasticated fabric which trimmed down your hips and tummy and had four hanging tabs to which you attached your stockings. (“Panty hose” came in with increasingly short skirts.) A garter belt which held up stockings without the horridly tight step-in became a sexy alternative, paired with loose French knickers.

From stockings we can segue to shoes. In the ‘60s we had appalling wedgies, shoes with a very thick cork sole. But then narrow, elegant high heels became the vogue and have stayed so ever since. Suffering for beauty certainly applies to wearing shoes with anything from three to four-inch heels, perhaps even higher. Yes, they make your legs look slim and shapely but oh, the agony of wearing and walking in them. In my latter years, alas, my heels have headed south and I have none more than one and a half inches.

And a postscript for a discussion of fashion. A raglan sleeve with a seam which runs from under the arm to the collarbone was named after Lord Raglan, the 1^st Baron Raglan who is said to have devised this style because he’d lost an arm in the Battle of Waterloo. Cardigans were also named after a military man, in this case the 7^th Earl of Cardigan, a British army major-general who led the Charge of the Light Brigade during the Crimean War. Apparently British officers wore knitted wool waistcoats during the war which morphed into the cardigan as we know it.

 

Quote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations:

British writer and broadcaster Malcolm Muggeridge on politician Anthony Eden, once Britain’s Foreign Secretary: “He was not only a bore; he bored for England.”