Foolish female fashions called painful, unhealthy and ugly

Friday, 09 July 2010 00:00

One hundred years ago, clippings from the newspapers of July 9, 1910.

Montreal Star. Columnist Agnes Chesley bemoans high heels, hobble skirts, tight corsets and other female fashion follies that are painful, fatiguing, “extremely bad for the health,” and “horribly ugly.”

On a day with the sun blazing down, the writer notices a pretty woman dressed in white with a black hat and “an expression of agony on her face,” caused by her “patent leather shoes with high heels.”

“Any doctor will tell you” that high heels are unhealthy. “The spine is apt to be injured and often there is internal trouble.” They are also, she writes, “extremely fatiguing… horribly ugly and stamp the person who wears them as both foolish and common. Fortunately the high heel is considered as bad form as the tight corset.”

The 1910, $4 Adjusto corset promised to “conceal all excess flesh.” From an advertisement in the Ottawa Citizen, July 30, 1910.

Women who wear hobble skirts “must hobble, not walk. Watch a woman in a two-yard or narrower skirt going upstairs or trying to get into a carriage or car. It is enough to make the gods weep.”

Other fashion follies condemned by the columnists are dangerously projecting hat pins, “ridiculous coiffures or false hair,” and hats too large for comfort.

Tight corsets might be bad form, as Ms. Chesley says, but they were apparently still popular, judging from an advertisement by retailer A.E. Rea and Company in the Ottawa Citizen (July 30) for the $4 Adjusto Corset. “Stout, medium and average women—thousands of them—are now wearing the Adjusto,” claims the ad, which shows a drawing of a buxom young lady with a wasp waist. Adjustable bands are said to provide “a far greater reduction of abdomen, hips and upper limbs… Stout, medium and average women—thousands of them—are now wearing the Adjusto. If you would conceal all excess flesh, appear stylish, graceful and enjoy better health and more comfort, the Adjusto is the ultimate corset.”

PAINFUL DIVORCE DATA
Peterborough Review. “It is painful to think that divorce is so prevalent,” comments the Review in reporting world divorce statistics. Leading the field is Japan with 215 divorced people per 100,000 population, followed by the United States with 73, Switzerland and France each with 23, and England and Wales with just two divorced people for every 100,000. Canadian statistics were not available, but the Review claimed that “Many are only living in legalized sin, and in the wretched hour they fly to the courts for liberty.”

SCUGOG BATHERS ROBBED
Lindsay Post (July 8). “A sneak thieve has been plying his vocation among the bathers in the Scugog [River], purloining the contents of their clothes while they are enjoying the plunge.” The Post suggests, “bathers appoint one of their own to stand guard while they are in the water.” No mention was made of the clothes themselves being stolen. That must have been fortunate for any bathers who happened to be skinny dipping.

POLITICAL PICNIC ORATORS
Kingston British Whig. The Whig deplores the fading practice of political picnics at which orators once captured audiences for hours of rhetoric. “In a Western paper, reference is made to a picnic at which the people began to enjoy themselves when the speeches were at an end,” says the Whig. “What mossback now believes the people, in a picnic mood, really desire to hear speeches? The picnic orator should be ducked in lake or pond.”