The Secret Behind the Gibson Girl’s Shape
The Gibson Girl, as I previously mentioned, had a distinctive silhouette: a small waist, an ample bosom, and a graceful sway to her back that thrust the aforementioned bosom forward and the bum backward. In some ways she was similar in shape to a Barbie doll, and, like Barbie, her figure was difficult for the average woman to attain.
The secret was the swan-bill corset, sometimes called the S-bend corset. And in keeping with the Gibson Girl’s reputation as an active, modern woman, the swan-bill corset was designed as a healthier alternative to the previously popular v-shaped corsets, which created a tiny waist in contrast to rounded hips, bust and belly and which had dominated women’s fashion in one form or another for several decades.
Healthier corsets were not a new idea. Doctors and dress reformers regularly railed against the fashion of tight-lacing to create an artificially small waist. Health corsets were intended to be comfortable while still supporting the bust.* They were often made with lighter-weight fabrics, elastic instead of bone or metal, buttons instead of a rigid steel busk at the front of the corset,** and more gentle shaping. For the most part, health corsets created a less dramatic version of the popular silhouette but did not change it.
Dr. Inès Gaches-Sarraute (1853-1928) invented the swan-bill corset in the 1890s, at much the same time as the Gibson Girl herself caught the public imagination. As a doctor, she saw women with gynecological issues and other medical problems that she believed were caused by the inward curve at the waist of the v-shaped corsets, which put pressure on the diaphragm, the abdomen and “vital female organs.”. The long, straight front of the swan-bill corset was intended to support the abdomen rather than constrict it.
Gauches-Sarraute did not intended her version of the health corset as a fashion statement. She billed it as a medical device. But unlike earlier health corsets, the swan-bill corset produced a new silhouette that inspired fashion designers to create a new style of clothing and their customers to adopt a changed posture borrowed from the military parade ground.***
*Although a few enterprising corsetiers, and one ingenious society woman, had created earlier versions of the bra, they did not take off until dressmaker Ida Rosenthal and her sculptor husband created the first commercial bra in the 1920s in response to the new shape demanded by flapper look. A story for another day.
*** The two-part busk itself was an improvement that made it easier to put a corset on and off without help.
***At least while posing for pictures. Many women achieved the new shape with discreet padding for and aft rather than by hyper-extending their back.
From the Archives: A Word with a Past: Kidnap
In the mid-seventeenth century, the British colonies in North America and the Caribbean were suffering from a labor shortage.
The colonies had originally attracted Britain’s surplus population: dreamers, fortune-hunters, religious nuts, younger sons, prisoners of war, political failures, vagrants, criminals, the homeless, and the desperate. Some came with a small financial stake. Many came as indentured servants. A few were physically coerced onto ships sailing west.*
In 1640s and 1650s, the population base in Britain took a hit. More than eleven per cent of the population died in the English Civil War. (In World War I, Britain’s second most devastating war, the loss was only three percent.) With so many young men killed, the birth rate went down. Consequently, wages went up. Plenty of people must have asked themselves, “Why leave civilization for the colonies?”
With voluntary immigration down, involuntary immigration became more important. The inmates of Britain’s prisons were given a chance at a new life–whether they wanted it or not. Grown men were “Barbadosed”–the seventeenth century equivalent of being shanghaied. (Another word with a past–and ugly imperialist/racist roots–now that I think about it).
Worst of all, children were snatched from their parents and sent to the colonies as indentured servants. As a result, a new word entered English:
Kidnap. .vt. To steal or carry off children or others in order to provide servants or laborers for the American plantations.
*Re-reading this fourteen years** after I originally wrote the post, I realized I slid right past the fact that thousands of Africans were being enslaved and sent to the New World at the same time. Perhaps I notice it now because I’ve been working hard at recognizing my historical blinders.
**Time passes when you’re reading and writing about history.
Charles Dana Gibson and the Great War
Seven days after the United States entered the Great War in April 1917, Woodrow Wilson established the Committee on Public information, a semi-official propaganda agency headed by journalist George Creel. The goal of the committee was to use mass communication to build support for the war effort.
While much of the committee’s work was aimed at placing articles in newspapers and magazines, Creel understood the power of visual arts. He later wrote:
“Even in the rush of the first days … I had the conviction that the poster must play a great role in the fight for public opinion. The printed word might not be read; people might choose not to attend meetings or to watch motion pictures, but the billboard was something that caught even the most indifferent eye …. What we wanted—what we had to have—was posters that represented the best work of the best artists—posters into which the masters of the pen and brush had poured heart and soul as well as genius.”
Creel appointed Charles Dana Gibson, then president of the Society of Illustrators and one of the best known and highest paid artists in the country, as the head of the Division of Pictorial Publicity. Gibson recruited more the 300 of the country’s top illustrators as unpaid volunteers, urging them to “Draw ’til it hurts.”* Over the course of two years, the division created more than 1400 pieces, including 700 posters for 58 government departments, exhorting Americans to enlist, buy liberty bonds, collect books for soldiers, and avoid waste.
In addition to leading the Division of Pictorial Publicity, Gibson also created satirical ant-German political cartoons for Life magazine. One of the most powerful was “And the Fool, He Called her His Lady Fair,”** which was published on May 7, 1917, only weeks after the United States entered the war. In it, Gibson presents war as a skeletal woman being wooed by a male figure who bears a clear resemblance to Kaiser Wilhelm II. Wreathed with cigarette smoke, dripping with jewels, wine dripping in blood-like puddles at her feet, she is long way from the wholesome Gibson Girl.
*Gibson also selected eight artists to travel with the American Expeditionary Force and record scenes from the front lines. The eight, who all were successful commercial illustrators for major magazines. were commissioned as captains in the Army. It was same rank given to accredited war correspondents, and in fact their work can been seen as another type of war reporting. If you want to know more about their story, you can read an article I wrote about it here. But I digress.
**A line from Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The Vampire.”