Fashioning the body: an intimate history of the silhouette

Contents

Medieval fashion, bodies, and transformations -- Puffed out chests and peascod paunches : the broadening of men's bodies from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century -- The pourpoint of Charles de Blois -- "Falsity and imposture" : stuffed codpieces -- Women's undergarments and the submission of the body in the sixteenth century -- The enigma of the iron corset -- Under the ruff -- The ancien régime of the body -- From the pourpoint to the justaucorps : a man's silhouette in the seventeeth and eighteenth centuries -- Whaleboned bodies and panniers : the mechanics of good carriage in the eighteenth century -- Whaleboned bodies and corsets for children from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries : a body to shape, a being to form -- The nineteenth century : from artifice to anonymity -- The corset, essential protagonist of modern femininity -- Crinolines and bustles, the reign of metallic artifices -- Corsets, belts, and padded calves : the masculine silhouette reconfigured -- Contemporary undergarments -- Brassieres, girdles, waspies and cami-panties since 1900 : the metamorphosis of the undergarment -- Corsets, crinolines, and bustles in today's fashions : drawing creative inspiration from the history of undergarments.