Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things (61 page)

Bathing Suit: Mid-19th Century, Europe

The origin of the bathing suit as a distinct piece of attire began in the mid-1800s. Prior to that time, recreational bathing was not a popular pastime; if a man or woman took a dip, it was in an undergarment or in the nude.

One major development helped change bathing practices and create a need for the bathing suit. European physicians in the 1800s began to advocate recreational bathing as a tonic for “nerves” —a term that encompassed something as temporary as lovesickness or as terminal as tubercular meningitis. The cure was the “waters” —mineral, spring, or ocean. By the tens of thousands, Europeans, who for centuries had equated full-body bathing with death, waded, soaked, and paddled in lakes, streams, and surf.

The bathing suits that emerged to fill this need followed the design of street dress. Women, for example, wore a costume of flannel, alpaca, or serge, with a fitted bodice, high neck, elbow-length sleeves, and a knee-length skirt, beneath which were bloomers, black stockings, and low canvas shoes. Wet, the bathing suit could weigh as much as the bather. Fatalities recorded in England and America attest to the number of waterlogged bathers caught in an undertow. The male outfit was only somewhat less cumbersome and dangerous.

These garments were strictly
bathing
suits, as opposed to the later, lighter
swimming
suits.

From about the 1880s, women could take a safer ocean dip in a “bathing machine.” The contraption, with a ramp and a dressing chamber, was wheeled from the sand into shallow water. A lady undressed in the machine, donned a shapeless full-length flannel gown fastened at the neck by a drawstring, and descended the ramp into the ocean. An awning, known as a “modesty hood,” hid her from males on the beach. Bathing machines were vigilantly guarded by female attendants, called “dippers,” whose job was to hasten the pace of male lingerers.

Shortly before America’s entry into World War I, the clinging one-piece suit became popular—though it had sleeves and reached to the knees; the women’s model also sported a skirt. The suit revolution was made possible in large measure by the textile know-how of a Danish-American named Carl Jantzen.

Born in Aarhus, Denmark, in 1883, Jantzen immigrated to America and in 1913 became a partner in Oregon’s Portland Knitting Mills. The firm produced a line of woolen sweaters, socks, caps, and mittens. Jantzen was experimenting with a knitting machine in 1915, attempting to produce a tighter, lighter-weight woolen sweater with exceptional stretch, when he developed an elasticized rib-knit stitch.

The wool knit was suppose to go into the production of sweaters. But a friend on the Portland Rowing Team asked Jantzen for an athletic outfit with more “give.” Jantzen’s skin-tight, rib-knit stretch suits were soon worn by every member of the team.

A bikini, as depicted in a fourth-century Roman mosaic. A nineteenth-century bathing outfit; dangerous when wet
.

The Portland company changed its name to Jantzen Knitting Mills and adopted the slogan: “The suit that changed bathing to swimming.”

Bikini
. Swimsuits became more revealing in the 1930s. From backless designs with narrow shoulder straps, women’s attire quickly progressed to the two-piece halter-neck top and panties. The bikini was the next step. And through its name, the fashion is forever linked with the start of the nuclear age.

On July 1, 1946, the United States began peacetime nuclear testing by dropping an atom bomb on the chain of Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean known as Bikini Atoll. The bomb, similar to the type that a year earlier devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, commanded worldwide media attention.

In Paris, designer Louis Réard was preparing to introduce a daringly skimpy two-piece swimsuit, still unnamed. Newspapers were filled with details of the bomb blast. Réard, wishing his suit to command media attention, and believing the design was itself explosive, selected a name then on the public’s lips.

On July 5, four days after the bomb was dropped, Réard’s top model, Micheline Bernardi, paraded down a Paris runway in history’s first bikini. In 1946, the swimsuit seemed to stir more debate, concern, and condemnation than the bomb.

Off-the-Rack Clothes: 18th Century, Europe

Given today’s wide selection of men’s and women’s attire in department stores and boutiques, it is hard to imagine a time when ready-made, ready-to-wear clothing did not exist. But off-the-rack garments have been a reality and a convenience for less than two hundred years. And high-quality ready-made clothes appeared only a hundred years ago. Previously, clothes were made when needed, by a professional tailor or a female member of the family.

The first ready-to-wear clothes were men’s suits. Loose, shapeless, and cheap, the garments sold in London in the early 1700s. Eschewed by men of style, and derided by professional tailors, who feared a loss of business, the ill-fitting suits were purchased by laborers and the lower classes, who were pleased to own a suit for special occasions, however ill-fitting.

With London’s lower classes significantly outnumbering the city’s gentlemen, and with many of the former aspiring to emulate the latter, it is not surprising that ready-made suits sold at a brisk pace. Within a decade, they were being produced in Liverpool and Dublin.

Tailors’ guilds attempted to thwart the trend. They expelled guild members who made the suits, while petitioning Parliament to outlaw ready-to-wear apparel. Parliament declined to enter into the imbroglio. And as more people purchased ready-made clothes, more tailors abandoned the guilds to satisfy the growing demand.

In the 1770s, the men’s ready-to-wear phenomenon hit Paris, Europe’s fashion center. Tailors competed for business among themselves by bettering the fit and quality of suits. And superior garments attracted a higher-class clientele. By the end of the decade, a half-dozen French firms featured suits as well as coats, the second ready-made item manufactured. The clothes were a particular favorite of sailors, whose brief time in port precluded multiple fittings for custom-made garments.

Women for many years continued to make their own clothes. They even resisted the concept of clothes produced by strangers, who possessed no knowledge of their personal style preferences and private body dimensions.

But the many conveniences of clothes ready-made over homemade—from a wider selection of styles, colors, and fabrics to the immense savings in time spent sewing—eventually won women over. The first large firm manufacturing ready-made clothes for women and children opened in Paris in 1824 and was called La Belle Jardinière because of its proximity to a flower market. In America around this time, 1830, Brooks Brothers of New Bedford, Massachusetts, began making ready-to-wear men’s clothing.

Two inventions of the day helped turn the manufacture of off-the-rack clothes into the multibillion-dollar industry it is today. The sewing machine (see page 147) permitted rapid mass production of garments; for the first time in history, clothes were not hand sewn. The second breakthrough
involved the adoption of a scale of standardized clothing sizes for men, women, and children.

Until around 1860, clothes were cut to size in one of two ways. A new garment was made by copying an existing one, which usually entailed unstitching and opening up fabric. Or a rough shape of the garment was cut out of muslin, basted on the wearer, and recut and reshaped in this manner until it fit satisfactorily. Then the perfected muslin pattern was copied in the garment’s actual and more expensive fabric. The tedious process is still employed for many couture creations, but it was unsuitable for mass production.

Standardized sizes, in the form of “graded paper patterns,” became an industry reality in the 1860s. No longer was it necessary for a customer to hold up three or four rack garments and guess which one would give the best fit.

Home seamstresses also turned to paper patterns, which were featured in magazines and store catalogues and sold through the mail. By 1875, paper patterns were selling at the rate of ten million a year. It became chic to wear a pattern-cut garment. Queen Victoria, who could well afford custom-tailored clothes for the royal family, ordered for her sons suits fashioned from Butterick patterns, the most popular name of the day.

There was a certain democracy to ready-to-wear clothes. They did not exactly prove that all people were created equal, but they did reassure that most people, rich and poor, came in a limited number of sizes. More important, for the first time in history, fashion was no longer the prerogative of the wealthy few but available to everyone.

Designer Labels: 19th Century, France

Dior. Blass. Klein. Givenchy. De la Renta. Von Furstenberg. Cassini. Cardin. Lauren. Gucci.

History records the names of today’s fashion designers, but nowhere in its pages are the names of the tailors, dressmakers, and seamstresses who clothed royalty and nobility throughout the ages. They must have existed. Fashion certainly did. France and Milan were recorded as two of Europe’s earliest fashion centers. But what was important prior to the late eighteenth century was the garment itself—the style, detailing, color, fabric, and, too, the person who paraded it; everything except the designer.

Who originated designer clothes and paved the way for the phenomenon of the name label?

Her name was Rose Bertin, the first fashion designer to achieve fame, recognition, and a page in the history books. Born Marie-Jeanne in Abbeville, France, in the mid-1700s, she might not have became famous, despite talent, had it not been for a series of fortunate encounters.

Rose Bertin began her career as a milliner in Paris in the early 1770s. Her stylish hats caught the attention of the duchess of Chartres, who became
her patron and presented her to Empress Maria Theresa. The Hungarian queen was displeased with the style of dress worn by her daughter, Marie Antoinette, and Rose Bertin was commissioned to make over the woman who would become perhaps France’s most extravagant and famous queen. Rose’s lavish costumes for the dauphine dazzled the French court, though they distressed the empress, who complained that her daughter now dressed with the excesses of a stage actress.

As queen, Marie Antoinette devoted increasingly more time and money to fashion. And as her extravagances rose to the level of a national scandal. Rose Benin’s salon became the fashion center of Paris. She dressed not only Marie Antoinette, meeting with the queen twice weekly to create new gowns, but most of the French aristocracy, as well as the queens of Sweden and Spain, the duchess of Devonshire, and the czarina of Russia.

Rose Benin’s prices were exorbitant. Even the fermenting revolution did nothing to lower the prices, the demand for gowns, and the queen’s commitment to fashion—which may have led to the arrest that resulted in her beheading.

Early in June 1791, prior to the planned escape of Marie Antoinette and her husband, set for the twentieth of the month, the queen ordered from Rose Bertin a large number of traveling outfits to be completed as quickly as possible. The discovery of the order is believed to have confirmed suspicions that the royal couple was about to flee the country.

The queen, of course, was caught, imprisoned, and guillotined in 1793. Rose Bertin fled to Frankfurt, then moved to London, where she continued to design clothes for European and Asian nobility. She died in 1812, during the reign of Napoleon.

Her worldwide fame helped draw attention to the people who design clothes. In Paris, salons and individual designers began to attach their own names to the fashions they created. And one Parisian designer, Charles Worth, introduced in 1846 the concept of using live models to display name-brand clothes—which were now protected by copyright from reproduction. Those events marked the birth of haute couture. And it was that nineteenth-century phenomenon, coupled with the concurrent rise of off-the-rack ready-wear, that made designer labels a possibility, then a profitable reality.

Chapter 13

Into the Bedroom

Bedroom: 3500
B.C
., Sumer

One third of the history of humankind has never been written, for it occurred in the eight nightly hours kings, queens, and commoners spent in bed over their lifetime. It’s as if between saying good night and sitting down for breakfast, humankind ceased to exist. But in those ignored—and seemingly lost—hours, man was conceived and born, sired future generations, and died. To venture into the bedroom is to enter a realm rich in its own lore, language, trivia, and erotica.

A special room in a house set aside for a bed first appeared in the royal palaces at Sumer about 3500
B.C
. One significant fact about ancient Sumerian bedrooms is that there was usually only one to a home, regardless of the immensity of the residence and the number of its inhabitants. The head of the household occupied the bedroom and its bed, while his wife, children, servants, and guests slept around the house on couches, on lounges, or on the floor. Pillows existed for everyone, but they were hard, curved headrests of wood, ivory, or alabaster, intended primarily to protect a styled coiffure overnight.