Breast
“Ah, the snows of the breast! Ah, the immodest women of Florence, who go around with their bosom on show,” complained Dante. One of the strongest factors influencing the way we dress is our attempt at seduction by using clothes to show off the body’s forms. But nothing is more effective than the direct presentation of nudity. Revealing the breasts was nudity’s first victory after the austere high-necked garments of the Middle Ages. In Dante’s time, necklines were certainly still high, a far cry from the romantic necklines of the nineteenth century which exposed bare arms, back and bosom. In 1342, the legislators in Perugia, who strove to banish any naked skin from the neck down, would have had a heart attack if they had been able to look five centuries into the future and see the nudity of a woman in evening dress at the height of the nineteenth century. As the years passed, chroniclers spoke of breasts being so pushed upwards by the neckline that they seemed about to burst out of the dress. Boccaccio used to wonder why we bother to hide breasts given that nature chose to put them in such a prominent place. The way that clothing has alternated between revealing and hiding breasts doubly underlines their importance. The height of collars rose to the point that they framed the face in the early 15th century: “Watch out for women with bare breasts,” roared Savonarola. After a barren period, pretty necklines brightened up the age of Enlightenment, though they no longer ran from one shoulder to the other, and necklines persisted but in a more moderate form. Arcadian shepherdess dresses also allowed glimpses of the breasts through their flimsy material. It was only when the cold winds of the French revolution began to whistle around the door that breasts were hidden by fichu. But breasts returned to sight, having their heyday at the end of the 19th century. The typical housewife, wrapped up in her high-necked everyday clothes, was turned into a woman of showy and glorious buxomness. All the beauty of her breasts was suddenly pushed upwards and displayed in bejewelled necklines of unprecedented lavishness. But amazing décolletages, milk-white skin (a tan would only become fashionable with Chanel), sculpted shoulders, and shapely arms were soon banished by the garµonne look and the ravages of the crisis-ridden 1930s to the extent that, for the first time, the neckline slipped down the back, changing its parameters to reveal a different part of the body. Beautiful necklines were created by the hidden presence of a wide variety of corsets, some more terrifying than others, for example, the cuirass and the bandages that flattened the bust under loose-fitting art deco dresses. Consequently, fetishes for underwear associated with breasts have flourished, as evidenced by the history of the bra, which, for a long time, was designed more to contain the bosom than to show it off. In the golden era of the first Italian ready-to-wear, masculine jackets worn under the banner of feminism — when bras were being burnt in the street — nobody spoke of breasts. It was a real handicap to be naturally well endowed; girls who always needed to add darts — an old technique used to construct curves around breasts — complained that they did not know how to compress their bosom under a linear and revealing jacket. Breasts are a sign of femininity and yet fashion is the godfather of other seduction innovations, from the military to the faux poverty look and from the oriental back to the androgynous. The early 1990s, just as had happened a hundred years earlier, echoed with the unanimous cry of “Designers — show us the body.” It began with breasts as the first stage in the renewed glorification of nudity after experiments with transparent materials creating a “now-you-see-me-now-you-don’t” effect. And what are we being shown now? The strapless heart-shaped neckline of the 1950s; dresses that lower their neckline at the back down to the base of the kidneys, adding inevitable frissons of excitement with every unexpected fall in the material; jackets slip casually and carelessly over shirts that are not quite done up; peplum dresses are worn undone around the chest. In the 1990s, attention was focused once again on the waist, and both necklines and corsets were reintroduced: confident women, aware of their bodies, are no longer adverse to the idea of the guêpière. This latest development in revealing a new area of the woman’s upper body was seen, according to a survey in an Italian daily newspaper, as offering women the possibility of discovering a natural spirituality from within. With all the pluralism of fashion, the nude, the scantily veiled, and the completely covered coexist happily together as a repertoire of roles — not just in terms of fashion — that can be drawn upon at different times of day and in different seasons. The invention of stretch fabrics, for example, has overshadowed the fashion for revealing transparencies. With the arrival of the new century, however, a new form of nudity was introduced with the revelation of the bottom.