Mimi Spencer: A British Look At Waists, Catwalks, And Women
If the shopping gene in you is searching for the defining vision of this autumn's dressing, look no further than the model Carmen Kass on the catwalk at Roland Mouret's autumn/winter collection in Paris. She wore a petrol-blue, wasp-waist outfit so pneumatic, so curvaceous, so goddamn hot that women (and, I fully expect, a few men) fell for it in droves. You could almost hear the purr as she walked the runway. That figure! That waist!
Waist? Surely you recall? It's the place where we used to keep our belts, before our pants went south and our bum cracks took up residence in the public eye. The waist, it turns out, is this year's headline fashion story. At the New York shows last week it got almost more attention than Anna Wintour's wardrobe. It was there at Michael Kors, the focal point of a dynamite strapless dress; there at Marc Jacobs, in a belt knotted so severely that it might well have done damage to poor Karen Elson's circulation. To shore up the trend, Kate Moss is promoting her darling, petite little waist in a thumping great belt on the cover of this month's Vogue.
Lovely. Except, of course, that none of us can wear it. The waist, you see, is dead. It has been excised by excess. By fortune and feasting and that churning feeling you get in your stomach when you're late for a meeting, of which more later. In the course of little more than a generation, a celebrated body part, long cherished as the very expression of femininity, has all but vanished for a vast swathe of the population. If it had happened to your nose or your nipples, you'd have something to say about it. But the waist has disappeared while our backs were turned and our attention was concentrated, as it has been for nigh on a decade, at the hip. It expired inexorably, with little eulogy, like the polar ice caps.
In 1951, the average British woman had a 27.5-inch waist. Now, she boasts a 34-incher. That's a growth of more than an inch a decade. Even Playboy centrefolds, academic studies show, have displayed increased waist sizes over time. In some respects, of course, the statistics aren't so surprising. After all, 38% of British women are now classified as overweight, and one in five of us is obese. But this collective massive weight gain hasn't just made us fatter - it has changed the very shape of women. We are, it seems, increasingly built like men.
"Women resemble men much more so than they did in the 50s," confirms Jeni Bougourd, senior research fellow at the London College of Fashion, who collaborated last year on a project called Size UK to assess the dimensions of the nation. "While we are bigger overall, the waist has grown more in proportion. During this period, the waist-hip ratio has gone from 0.7 to more than 0.8. Modern women are much straighter now."
We are blockier, too, and stronger, chunkier; more Yorkie man than Flake girl. While men's waist sizes have also increased over the same period (to an average of 37 inches today), their fat distribution - the classic apple shape - has remained broadly constant. It is women whose proportions have changed.
Which, historically at least, is a great shame. Replay in your mind the iconic images of womankind, and the waist plays a starring role. Think of The Rokeby Venus by Velazquez, our heroine with her back to the viewer, boasting an ample pair of buttocks and a wonderful, slender waist. Or The Swing by Fragonard, an erotic conflation of billowing skirts and minuscule, embrace-me waist. Fast forward to Scarlett O'Hara clutching the bedpost as she was sardined into her stays. Think of Dior's New Look, or Marilyn, with her man-trapping 22-inch waist (19 when corseted). Or Brigitte, or Liz Taylor, before kaftans and Virginia Woolf.
According to our long-established socio-cultural norms, women should nip in at the equator. Indeed, at the turn of the century, a girl's eligibility was said to be judged by the size of her waist - which should be "twice the circumference of her neck, which, in turn, should be twice the circumference of her wrist", as defined by the dressmakers' guidelines of the day. The shape was judged so erotic that artist Edouard Manet declared in 1876: "The satin corset is perhaps the nude of our time."
The imagery is so consistent because, according to social anthropologists, there is an evolutionary imperative at play. The "magic ratio" of waist to hips is, for women, 7:10. "That silhouette is going to have a sexual appeal at a primeval level," says Desmond Morris. "It's signalling the child-bearing pelvic girdle, there's no great mystery about that." Susan Bordo, in Reading the Slender Body, her key feminist piece of the early 90s, maintained that the 19th-century hourglass figure was the body type that best represented "maternal femininity".
"It was the emphasis on breasts and hips, which contrasted with the wasp waist; this underscored the idea of separate spheres, with men's and women's bodies looking so different." says Becky Conekin, historian at the London College of Fashion.
Which leaves modern women with something of a problem. We are increasingly tubular; less pear, more sausage. You'll know this if the old romantic in you has ever tried to cram itself into your grandmother's wedding dress. You'll know it if you have ever picked up a little Dior dress at a vintage shop and felt like Gulliver in Lilliput. A friend of mine who collects 30s clothes only ever hangs them on the wall. "It's not just that these things are precious," she shrugs. "There's simply no way anyone I know could fit into them."
Waist? Surely you recall? It's the place where we used to keep our belts, before our pants went south and our bum cracks took up residence in the public eye. The waist, it turns out, is this year's headline fashion story. At the New York shows last week it got almost more attention than Anna Wintour's wardrobe. It was there at Michael Kors, the focal point of a dynamite strapless dress; there at Marc Jacobs, in a belt knotted so severely that it might well have done damage to poor Karen Elson's circulation. To shore up the trend, Kate Moss is promoting her darling, petite little waist in a thumping great belt on the cover of this month's Vogue.
Lovely. Except, of course, that none of us can wear it. The waist, you see, is dead. It has been excised by excess. By fortune and feasting and that churning feeling you get in your stomach when you're late for a meeting, of which more later. In the course of little more than a generation, a celebrated body part, long cherished as the very expression of femininity, has all but vanished for a vast swathe of the population. If it had happened to your nose or your nipples, you'd have something to say about it. But the waist has disappeared while our backs were turned and our attention was concentrated, as it has been for nigh on a decade, at the hip. It expired inexorably, with little eulogy, like the polar ice caps.
In 1951, the average British woman had a 27.5-inch waist. Now, she boasts a 34-incher. That's a growth of more than an inch a decade. Even Playboy centrefolds, academic studies show, have displayed increased waist sizes over time. In some respects, of course, the statistics aren't so surprising. After all, 38% of British women are now classified as overweight, and one in five of us is obese. But this collective massive weight gain hasn't just made us fatter - it has changed the very shape of women. We are, it seems, increasingly built like men.
"Women resemble men much more so than they did in the 50s," confirms Jeni Bougourd, senior research fellow at the London College of Fashion, who collaborated last year on a project called Size UK to assess the dimensions of the nation. "While we are bigger overall, the waist has grown more in proportion. During this period, the waist-hip ratio has gone from 0.7 to more than 0.8. Modern women are much straighter now."
We are blockier, too, and stronger, chunkier; more Yorkie man than Flake girl. While men's waist sizes have also increased over the same period (to an average of 37 inches today), their fat distribution - the classic apple shape - has remained broadly constant. It is women whose proportions have changed.
Which, historically at least, is a great shame. Replay in your mind the iconic images of womankind, and the waist plays a starring role. Think of The Rokeby Venus by Velazquez, our heroine with her back to the viewer, boasting an ample pair of buttocks and a wonderful, slender waist. Or The Swing by Fragonard, an erotic conflation of billowing skirts and minuscule, embrace-me waist. Fast forward to Scarlett O'Hara clutching the bedpost as she was sardined into her stays. Think of Dior's New Look, or Marilyn, with her man-trapping 22-inch waist (19 when corseted). Or Brigitte, or Liz Taylor, before kaftans and Virginia Woolf.
According to our long-established socio-cultural norms, women should nip in at the equator. Indeed, at the turn of the century, a girl's eligibility was said to be judged by the size of her waist - which should be "twice the circumference of her neck, which, in turn, should be twice the circumference of her wrist", as defined by the dressmakers' guidelines of the day. The shape was judged so erotic that artist Edouard Manet declared in 1876: "The satin corset is perhaps the nude of our time."
The imagery is so consistent because, according to social anthropologists, there is an evolutionary imperative at play. The "magic ratio" of waist to hips is, for women, 7:10. "That silhouette is going to have a sexual appeal at a primeval level," says Desmond Morris. "It's signalling the child-bearing pelvic girdle, there's no great mystery about that." Susan Bordo, in Reading the Slender Body, her key feminist piece of the early 90s, maintained that the 19th-century hourglass figure was the body type that best represented "maternal femininity".
"It was the emphasis on breasts and hips, which contrasted with the wasp waist; this underscored the idea of separate spheres, with men's and women's bodies looking so different." says Becky Conekin, historian at the London College of Fashion.
Which leaves modern women with something of a problem. We are increasingly tubular; less pear, more sausage. You'll know this if the old romantic in you has ever tried to cram itself into your grandmother's wedding dress. You'll know it if you have ever picked up a little Dior dress at a vintage shop and felt like Gulliver in Lilliput. A friend of mine who collects 30s clothes only ever hangs them on the wall. "It's not just that these things are precious," she shrugs. "There's simply no way anyone I know could fit into them."