In the 1956 version of
The King and I<\/strong>, there’s a bit where Anna Leonowens
(Deborah Kerr) is surrounded by an army of small children trying to lift
her skirt up. Understandably disturbed (her background is, after all, in
the mores of Victoriana), she seeks an explanation from the eponymous
King’s ‘head wife’, who replies placidly that they
think she is dressed like that because she’s “shaped <\/span>like that”.<\/p>\n
“Well, I certainly am NOT,” she replies, lifting up her
crinoline to reveal a neat little pair of ankle-length
bloomers.<\/p>\n Deborah Kerr: A Crinoline Made of
Children<\/p><\/div>\n
The King and I <\/span>was one of
my mother’s army of VHS tapes recorded off 1990s TV to keep her
offspring pacified of a Saturday night, and I always watched Deborah
Kerr sailing around the orientalist palace with a confusion similar to
that expressed by the child army.\u00a0Why did these women
wear\u00a0clothes that made them look like a different species from
their male counterparts? It’s apparently illogical, one of
fashion’s many
confusing mistakes<\/a>, yet the big skirt trend was one that
dominated female fashion for at least three centuries, and continued
to have iconic moments long after the Victorians. In fact, it’s
a true constant, from Madame de Pompadour and Elizabeth the First to
Dior’s New Look, Marilyn Monroe’s subway moment,
Grease <\/em>(where Sandy rejecting it in favour of spray-on wet
look leggings always feels troubling), and, relatively more
recently, the designs of Vivienne Westwood.<\/p>\n
There is an obvious explanation for its attractiveness which can
be seen simply by looking at the silhouette: in algebraic terms,
massive hips = lots of lovely womb space to let. In the case of
the twentieth century’s most famous blonde, the explanation
reaches new realms of subtlety (big skirt + wind + camera =
\u00a3\u00a3\u00a3). But this precludes their frequent favour with
the women themselves: Madame de Pompadour and Marie Antoinette
were, as Westwood is, fashion leaders, not followers, and it
cannot be denied that there is a certain something about a skirt
with a big twirl factor that feels inoffensively joyful. And
looking back to Elizabeth ‘Heart and Stomach of a Man’
The First, it seems unlikely that the Ditchley Portrait is trying
to convey nothing more than Hey Boys, Check Out My Womb.<\/p>\n
So what is <\/span>a
‘crinoline’?\u00a0It’s actually something
very specific; in its original sense specific enough to be a
brand name, referring to ‘a stiff fabric made\u00a0of
horse-hair and cotton or linen thread’. The brand name
in question uses
crinoline<\/em>‘s literal meaning,
‘hair-thread’ to allude to its composition from
horse hair, but later on,
crinoline<\/em> comes to refer to other materials, such
as ‘whalebone or iron hoops’, which serve to
expand petticoats. The dictionary gives as a second
definition the crucial word ‘hoop-petticoat’,
which it glosses as something ‘worn under the skirt
of a woman’s dress in order to support or distend
it’.<\/p>\n The much-touted Ditchley
Portrait. Check out the womb.<\/p><\/div>\n
This ‘hoop-petticoat’ was the eighteenth
century term for the big skirt, and here it took the
form of an architectural arrangement of side-panniers so
wide that doorways frequently had to be expanded to
accommodate their wearers. But it was not something new:
on the contrary, the hoop bore no small resemblance to
earlier innovations, most notably the sixteenth-century
(Ditchley Portrait) ‘farthingale’,
supposedly so named in reference to the wooden structure
that gave it its shape \u2013 which was, ironically
enough, a sort of wooden cage.\u00a0Conversely,
the\u00a0crinoline<\/em>, a nineteenth century invention,
reached new heights of freedom, since for the first
time the skirt could move independently of its owner,
a phenomenon that may have led to the Victorian
preoccupation with ankles, but which certainly created
a new erotic focus for men walking through the park on
a windy day. Previous to this, women hankering after
widened hips had to wear many layers of heavy
under-petticoats in addition to the cage-structure,
which not only hindered their movement but also
hampered the skirt’s possible circumference, so
once the light and airy crinoline-cage appeared, a
side-effect was the virtually limitless expansion of
the skirt’s width \u2013 reaching its nexus in
Anna Leonowens’ ridiculous garments, whose
recreation in 1956 combined the excesses of the New
Look silhouette with the historical extravagance of
the Victorian empire.<\/p>\n
Indeed, it is perhaps here that the crinoline shows
its teeth: the well-known Getting
To Know You<\/a> sequence shows a maternal,
wide-hipped Anna Leonowens sitting among her Gentle
Savage pupils and breezing about the palace with an
ease denied to the stiffly clad king’s wives,
making the big skirt somehow emblematic of the
West’s superior treatment of women, and the
‘enlightened ideas’ of the British
Empire, while its unstoppable expansion may itself
have something to do with the ever-increasing size
of colonial ambition.<\/p>\n
Perhaps, then, with all these sartorial
possibilities, it was to be expected that the
term should gradually itself expand, to
encompass transferred meanings: a piece of
diving equipment allowing the diver to
‘breathe more freely’ \u2013 of
course, everyone knows about whalebone’s
famous facilitation of easy breathing \u2013
and, for ships, a ‘defence against
torpedoes’. I particularly enjoy the use
of traditional pronouns in the last citation the
dictionary gives, from 1885: ‘Her
crinoline defences against torpedoes’,
because it returns to one of the
petticoat’s primary social significations,
mooted in The Spectator way back circa
1711:<\/p>\n
‘Our sex has of late years been very
saucy, and [so] the Hoop-Petticoat is made use
of to keep us at a distance’.
Another journal commented that the
hoop’s ‘compass’ keeps
‘men at a decent distance, and
appropriates to every lady a spacious verge
sacred to herself’. It is interesting to
note the strength words in this context \u2013
from the whalebone ‘supporting and
distending’ the skirt, steel hoops and
all the way to the initial definition of the
word as a ‘stiff lining’. The
suggestion here could be that the structures
underneath a woman’s clothes must either
lend strength to something fundamentally
flimsy (that old ‘body of a weak and
feeble woman’ chesnut), or, conversely,
that this is a type of armour, the armour worn
by, as Elizabeth I would probably have put it,
a ‘king, and a king of England
too’. In the queen’s case,
I’m sure there’s something going
on with metaphorical hip-circumferance
fertility: the virgin mother of the nation,
but one whose regal power gives her a strength
akin to a sacrificed Christ, a mother who will
fight tooth and nail to protect her
child-country. Less maternal, more
martial?<\/p>\n![\"Anna](\"https:\/\/i2.wp.com\/www.badreputation.org.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/10\/anna.jpg\")
<\/a>
Hair of the Dog<\/strong><\/h2>\n
<\/a>
Her crinoline defences<\/strong><\/h2>\n
\nThe Spectator, 1711<\/p><\/blockquote>\n