That was my post, and I didn't read an article to come to that conclusion. In fact, it wasn't a conclusion, really, just a "toss it out there" idea, based on my own personal experience and observation. I'm aware of the paintings in which fleshier women appear (some of the Dutch ones in that same time period show the same sort of voluptuousness, too), but when you look at the nudes, it always seems to come down to an exaggeration of the sitter's hips/thighs. It's also an obsession that didn't show up everywhere, even in Europe, and certainly didn't maintain its presence in later centuries. I don't seem to recall something similar showing up at all until the lateish 19th century. I'm really trying to avoid starting some sort of hot-and-bothered, flaming thread here. It's not my business to be berating modern people for weight issues, and I wouldn't, anyways, having suffered from society's reaction to my own shape most of my life. So no value judgements. I was just wondering if the reason some of us see so many badly fitting bodices on women now is a combination of many of the women simply being larger, combined with some amount of bad taste, and a fair quantity of misinformation. I've done a lot of historical costuming over the last 2 decades (much of it for myself), and I know how many fittings of patterns and whatnot I've had to do to get the right look with my modern body. --Sue, in grey pre-dawn Montana, where it looks like our unseasonably warm weather has gone away again, alas!
----- Original Message ----- From: "otsisto" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Historical Costume" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Sunday, January 01, 2006 11:49 PM Subject: RE: [h-cost] Re: Bosoms <snipped> > The thing is that these are all "Italian". There are a rare few Landsknecht. > I have a hard time finding the sort of squeezed melons on a platter in other > countries until the early to mid 1600s. > I think that the reason that women from the RenFaires like to wear the MoaP > is because 1. they are told the myth that that is how it was worn and 2. It > makes them feel a bit sexy. > A note on a previous post about modern women having bigger breast and > heavier weight then they did back when. I don't think that the person who > wrote the article you read had a look at late 1500s "Italian" paintings. IMO > > De _______________________________________________ h-costume mailing list h-costume@mail.indra.com http://mail.indra.com/mailman/listinfo/h-costume
