Undressed at Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum: smalls wonder

Two exhibitions deal with the centuries-old practice of shaping and adornment of the human body.

Convict love token, H. Heald, (1825-35). From A Fine Possession at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney.

Human beings, for thousands of years and in all known cultures, have taken pleasure in shaping and adorning the body. The range of practices is extensive, from athletics and dance — training the body to a harmonious and healthy form in the best cases — to mutilations, scarifications, distortions of features and disfigurement of various kinds in cultures oppressed by fear and superstition.

Some of these practices survive in contemporary culture, betraying alienation and anxi­ety: from the abuse of gymnastic training to produce not harmonious form but hypertrophied and useless musculature, to the piercings and tattoos that for some are part of an extreme, even self-mortifying way of life, and for others are merely a superficial affectation.

Two exhibitions at the Powerhouse in Sydney deal with less dramatic but no less interesting cases of shaping and adornment: one with the evolution of modern underwear, in an exhibition from the Victoria and Albert Museum in London; the other with the history of jewellery, which includes works from antiquity and from cultures all over the world as well as contemporary design.

Perhaps most interesting of all is a display produced by the Powerhouse to accompany the V&A exhibition and devoted to Australian fashion company Berlei, which was in the vanguard of producing foundation garments, as they were known, for a mass market.

In 1926, Berlei — the name was a suitably continental version of the founder’s real but conspicuously unfeminine surname, Burley — undertook a study of the shape of the female body in partnership with the University of Sydney. Six thousand women were measured in this “National Census of Women’s Measurements” and, from the resulting data, five body shapes were defined.

On either side of the proportions defined as “average” were four other types labelled “sway back”, “hip”, “abdomen” and “short below waist”, representing the various ways in which the female body was liable to diverge from a statistically average morphology. These findings helped the company to develop a calculating device, the Berlei Type Indicator, by which any woman could be allocated to her appropriate type based on her bust, waist and hip measurements. The whole undertaking is interesting from several points of view, most obviously as an example of the way that individuals are processed into statistics in a mass society and for the purposes of mass marketing. We are all too familiar with a media and advertising environment that encourages in women a constant anxiety about the proportions of their figures.

At the same time, the Berlei taxonomy clearly is intended to be objective, identifying a woman’s body type to find the most flattering way to dress her. The implicit conclusion that corporeal beauty lies in the average is consistent with classical theory and is significantly unlike the confected images of contemporary media that emphasise freakish proportions and body shapes to which average women can never aspire. So Berlei’s marketing between the world wars was probably less likely to foster neurosis and anxiety than the more recent advertising campaigns of the past three or four decades. But a video version of one of its cinema advertisements from around 1930 shows that it certainly appealed to snobbery and associations of wealth and glamour.

This was before the age of television, and filmed advertisements were made to screen in cinemas, before or after the shorts that preceded the main feature film. They could therefore be much longer and more leisurely than today’s television advertisements, and this one is deliberately presented as a short narrative film, slightly more than five minutes in duration. It is shot with self-conscious style, from the carefully composed opening shot onwards, intended to resonate with art deco chic.

The subject is a rich, spoiled young woman who sullenly complains that her expensive new dress doesn’t fit her. Her older and more experienced friend tells her she needs a foundation garment, and much is made of the fact this is not the same as an old-fashioned corset. It is based on the new, scientific Berlei system; not one-size-fits-all but adapted to her particular shape. Needless to say, the rich young woman ends up delighted with the result and vows never to go without a foundation garment again.

What is unspoken in the ad is clearly that the young woman wants her body to have the same firm, definite formal qualities as the art deco ornaments and furniture all around her. She is intending to wear a loose, informal modern dress, but there cannot be anything loose, informal or unpredictably mobile about the body beneath it.

The control and structuring of the female body was one of the principal purposes of undergarments throughout the centuries covered by the main exhibition, even if hygiene and warmth also have been important considerations. And clearly the shape of the waist has been consistently regarded as of paramount importance in defining the femininity of the figure.

We have seen the fetishisation of the waist reach new heights in recent years with the compulsion to bare the midriff, the most unforgiving part of the body to display, since it generally can be shown off only by very young women and those who have not borne children. In earlier centuries such a display of naked flesh would have been unthinkable, but corsets were used to create waistlines slimmer than any natural figure, in some cases were so absurdly small as to distort the shape of the rib cage.

But the waistline created by the use of a corset was not, like the bare midriff, simply evidence of extreme slimness, for in reality it was meant to set off the feminine curves of the bust and the hips. If the waist was made smaller, the other two were often made bigger. This was the purpose of various designs of modern brassieres, but within the exhibition it is particularly the bustles and whale bone armatures meant to enhance the natural expansion of the hips that are striking, since they conceal the real shape of belly and hips while alluding playfully to alluring femininity.

There have been some changes through the centuries, from more to less extreme corseting and, in the 1920s, to foundation garments that for the first time perhaps tried to minimise the bust and hips to create a boyish figure. From the 60s, a more natural shape was preferred, without foundation garments or at least without visible ones, and the contemporary fashion for exercise arose to achieve a trim and shapely figure by natural means.

That generally has been the assumption in the case of the male body, which is why male underwear, though represented, is of relatively little interest. The exception is a splendid male girdle of the Victorian era, designed to help some general or ambassador look dignified in formal dress despite his excessive corpulence.

Jewellery, the subject of the other exhibition, also has been disproportionately the preserve of women, particularly in the West and in recent centuries. The exhibition, however, covers a far wider chronological and geographic range, from ancient times and across civilisations and cultures around the world.

The exhibition shows how humans have used jewellery for magical and protective purposes as amulets, charms and symbols of the divine, and how for those purposes they have been drawn to materials that were hard, brilliant or imperishable, including gold and every variety of gem, as well as semi-precious stones such as jade, particularly prized in China.

Beyond the magical, or simultaneously, humans have sought to adorn their bodies to display their wealth and status, and to enhance beauty and sexual appeal. The pathos of jewellery in the modern world, indeed, is that it is promoted largely as associated with beauty, romance and sexual appeal but is worn disproportionately by older women, just as the most expensive cars are driven by older men.

While the purpose of jewellery may vary from time to time and in different cultures, the overriding impression the exhibition conveys is that humans will stop at nothing and have no hesitation at despoiling or plundering any part of the natural world that can serve to adorn their bodies. Apart from precious minerals and stones of every variety, there are ivory, tortoiseshell and coral, and in one display case a necklace from New Ireland made of thousands of tiny iridescent beetle legs.

There are some rather gruesome brooches made of the heads of South American hummingbirds, or even their beaks and feet, but worst of all is a necklace from Kiribati made of human teeth: one can see at once that they are mostly incisors from the lower jaw, and the label informs us that the teeth come from between 30 and 180 individuals: the ambiguity, we infer, depending on whether whole rows of lower teeth were taken from 30 individuals or only one tooth each from six times as many.

The association of death with jewellery is profound. There are love tokens and miniature portraits to remember loved ones in absence and after their disappearance and, especially following the example of Queen Victoria, whole parures made of black jet. There are even ornaments that incorporate the dead person’s hair, not merely as a few strands curled in a locket but woven into a bracelet, for example.

Australia is well represented, thanks to the gold rush that made the precious metal relatively plentiful in the late 19th century. The designs are elaborate rather than refined, but the most entertaining are those designed as souvenirs of the goldfields cities: if you had made your fortune from goldmining, you might well want your wife to wear a gold brooch adorned with a realistic trophy of shovels, pans and other mining equipment.

More touching, though, are a few humble pieces of convict jewellery. One of these was originally a 1797 penny that has been rubbed smooth and its surface engraved, about 1810, with a schematic figure of a man, legs akimbo as though riding a horse, but really to reveal the chains that attach each ankle to a ball behind. The figure stands with one hand on his hip and with the other holds the long clay pipe that he smokes with remarkable insouciance.

Another coin dates from about 1825 to 1835 and is much plainer; there is no cheeky or defiant image, just a simple message that, despite its unambiguous sense, implies some enforced separation for which we cannot know the reason: “Keep this dear Mary for my sake till the departure of thy life / The gift of a friend whose love for you will never end. H. Heald.”

Undressed: 350 Years of Underwear in Fashion

Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, until July 12

A Fine Possession: Jewellery and Identity

Powerhouse Museum, until September 20