Roundabout
Restrictive Practices
By KATHARINE WHITEHORN THERE is a war on at the moment which will shake the women of Britain to their foundations, if the makers of the founda- tions have anything to do with it. The mere thirty million that women spent on corsets ten years ago is now sixty million: the estimate for 1961 is a
gross figure of £75 mil-
There are over a hundred corset firms going in this country, and the biggest job for all of them is to stop women thinking of corsets as just a grim necessity. Once a music-hall joke, the foundation is now an intimate revue number— or so the manufacturers hope. They have tried them in different colours, they have tried cover- ing them with frills and lace. Playtex are marketing them in perspex cylinders. Silhouette spent £100,000 on a three-week campaign to launch the Little X a few years ago (quite apart from any money paid out to fractured models who failed to spring in the air at the right angle). Berlei is trying to establish a double standard: Casual foundations and formal foundations; they are fifth in publicity spending but even they get through over £150,000 a year.
Triumph recently opened a salon in Savile Row so exotic that no foundations appear in the re- ception hall at all—only Regency decorations, coffee, atmosphere and a statue of an Ideal Woman. All this is the work of a Mr. Peter Craig-Raymond, who as Company Councillor (a Company Councillor seems to be to a promotion manager what a rodent operative is to a rat- catcher) is determined to get the British woman to buy five bras a year instead of two and to give her girdles she would not mind being seen alive in ('We must,' he says, 'be realistic'). The impression left by Mr. Craig-Raymond's publicity is that this is all a new venture to the 100-year-old German firm of Triumph. But even three years ago, they were trying hard to beat up public interest; they took thirty British journalists off to Bavaria to see the lands where the corsets grow. It was a memorable trip. When we arrived at Stuttgart there was a barrage balloon floating above the airport bearing (by sheer coincidence, as it turned out) the name of the firm; we were naturally surprised to see its billowing curves unconfined by corsets. We toured factories, we saw piles upon piles of enormous pink casings, we inspected room after room in which hundreds of women worked without makeup and without benefit of the firm's products. We were enter- tained, in what was probably Stuttgart's, and therefore the world's, worst night club. We were overwhelmed with statistics: enough metal was used for boning every month to go twice round the world (presumably not quite what Puck meant when he promised to put a girdle round the earth in twenty minutes). To crown it all we were offered a fashion show, in which one Frau Lise- Lotte, forty-five stone if an ounce, coyly modelled her corsets with a rose pinned on her petticoat. On second thoughts, perhaps Mr. Craig- Raymond's regime is somewhat of an advance.
Besides promoting prettier foundations to people who wear them anyway, the firms are trying to interest new groups in them—and par- ticularly the teenage market. Berlei, for instance, have a whole range of Teenform bras, and Triumph are marketing bras packed in record sleeves; they are hampered slightly by the tra- ditional names, and are holding a competition to find something easier off the tongue.
You might think that the older, staider schools of corsetry would be dismayed by this boom in the ready-made trade; but they say not. They say, in fact, that by plugging the idea of the per- fect-fitting corset, the ready-made people are in- directly helping the made-to-fit trade. However, they are not dragging their feet in the move to
smarten up. Spirella, the oldest hands at the game, have just given a face-lift to their Oxford Circus centre, all statues and blue flowered wall- paper and a watered silk tent in the middle of the showroom 'for fitting clients quickly in special circumstances.' They operate through a team Of 6,000 women, many part-time, a third of whom have been loosing and binding for more than twenty years. They take ten measurements for a girdle, six for a bra, and send them in to the central factory, whence emerges the ultimate girdle: they also undertake service calls for clients who have blown a gasket or require a reef to be taken. Spirella are still fairly God-fearing compared to, say, the French firm of Lejaby; but the fact that they have now started to make swim- suits suggests that sooner or later even their cor- sets may attain to some real allure.
But before foundations are built for allure alone, a fundamental change will have to occur in the mentality of corset men; and it will be a sad shame if it does. For a really clean, unsnig- gering attitude to human anatomy, the men who construct corsets are an inspiration. I had a long talk, at the Spirella opening, with a Mr. Keegan, who helps run their factory; he gave me a mass of utterly unembarrassed information. He told me that in 1911, the number of stays—bones you had in your corset was a status symbol, so that a woman asked for 'a 28-bone corset'; but that, in fact, bones never held anyone in : all they do is to hold in position the cloth that does the work. He confirmed what a dotty old Russian corsetiere once told me: that a good bra should never depend mainly on the straps, and that a woman will always feel much more comfortable sustained from beneath. He explained at length the difference between the Polynesian pointed bosom much in vogue after the war (because, I suppose, the Hays Office ban on cleavage took no account of summitry) and the rounded Nordic shape popular now—and explained it with his hand resting with absolute unselfcon- sciousness on the curves of a display statue.
The Craig-Raymond visual approach may sell more corsets; but one cannot but admire the attitude of the old-timers. One of them, at a recent Triumph show, watched a pretty girl pirouetting in a white girdle and not much else and leaned forward appreciatively. 'It's really wonderful value,' he said, 'for 29s. ltd.'
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