If you’re in or near Montevideo Uruguay, there is still another week to visit an exhibition I recommend in the Teatro Solis in the Old City From Tueday to sunday it is open from 5pm to 7pm. During the week that is afternoon peak hours, but traffic and parking is easy on the weekends 🙂 This interesting fibreart exhibition is subtitled ‘more than a garment’.

By sheer coincidence, just before visiting this exhibition, I finished reading vol. #3 in a historical fiction series by VL McBeath set in industrial Victorian England, “When Time Runs Out”. One thread running through this series is that all the female characters struggle in various ways to cope with rigid societal expectations about their lives and place in a society, proper and appropriate clothing and behaviour, including where you should live according to your social standing. Central to all these concerns is the issue of education for girls. It was regarded as unnecessary to educate them beyond grade school level because a woman’s role was only to marry well, produce children and run the man’s household. Property ownership and financial affairs were in male hands, and women’s opinions on anything outside household matters were considered unimportant. But by half way through this book the Suffragette movement was in full swing, and towards the end of it an important character, Harriet, who has always strongly rebelled against repressive ideas and controls from all the males in her life, angrily leaves home with nothing but the clothes on her back, slips and falls off a pathway into the canal below, and either drowns or floats downstream to emerge and continue on in life in some way… but for the answer to that I have to wait until I can read vol. #4 🙂

On my fortnightly zoom call with some textile artist friends I mentioned this exhibition, and found several of us were old enough to have experienced the serious body control of what my mother termed ‘good foundation garments‘. These included corsets or girdles, and in my teens panty girdles or what the boys called ‘iron strides’ became available and popular. None of us even possess any kind of girdle today, though we all still wear bras to gently shape our figures under our clothes. Mum only ever abandoned wearing her own girdle when on holiday at the beach, and she made sure we were properly fitted out early in our teens. The aim was to smoothe the female shape and control any floppy flab to make the clothing of the day look more elegant, but I’m sure in Mum’s mind wearing one added some kind of respectability, somehow, and my contemporaries all accepted this new stage in our lives, until the modern the feminist movement began to influence us in the early 70s. Fashion conscious girls like myself certainly needed a well supported (boned) strapless bra (more properly callked ‘bustiers’) for strapless or near strapless party dresses. We then discussed ‘corsets’, ‘girdles’ and ‘panty girdles’ all of which several of us wore in our youth. Women today still wear foundation garments such as Spanks, one brand of smoothing shaping garments, but they do so voluntarily when they are looking for a well smoothed look in a fitting dress, typically for a special occasion. There are some who wear them all the time, but there is no societal expectation that the modern woman must have that hourglass figure which in other times and cultures has sybolised perfection of womanhood.

The most extreme of those restricting garments did incredible harm to women’s rib cages and incredibly squashed organs within female abdominal cavity, and thinking about all that, I googled “When did corsets first appear in female clothing?” I was astonished by the answer in this really interesting article on the history of women’s clothing, I’d forgotten the archeological record of painted vessels and figurines of the Minoan civilisation of Crete in the eastern Mediterranean from around 1000BC !!

An important difference between my early Australian BabyBoomer life and women’s experiences in previous centuries though, was that by the 50s in the Western world, all girls automatically received the same basic education as boys did. We were raised understanding that we could choose to do almost anything in life in addition to, or instead of, producing and raising children. Women of my age went out to work once their children went off to school, and nowadays returning to work within weeks or months after childbirth is standard, so there are very few stay-at-home-mothers these days. I’ve always been free to form my own opinion on anything, including how I might vote in local, state and national elections. In a previous life I successfuly stood for a local government election, and Mike’s and my votes have sometimes cancelled out each other’s on certain election issues.

Below are more of my favourites from the show:

Many of the pieces in this exhibition displayed something of the contrast between the effect of looking ‘good’ in society’s terms and some degree of physical and mental discomfort or pain endured by the wearer. Some notable exceptions that I liked were Pablo Ausliso’s “Bucolic Baroquism” –

…. and Mercedes Fernandez’s “Torso Nativo”