Bobbing their hair, smoking in public, and going on unchaperoned dates weren’t the only ways in which liberated women of the 1920s were acting like men. They also were binding their chests, “because they wanted to have that boyish figure,” says Tim Long, manager of the Chicago Historical Society’s Hope B. McCormick Costume Center. So in order to properly display clothes from the collection’s extensive Jazz Age holdings for the exhibit “Fashion, Flappers ‘n All That Jazz,” Long and his colleagues had to take some drastic measures with the mannequins.
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“We had to cut their breasts off,” says Long. “We had to cut hips out. If the torso size was too long we had to cut the mannequin apart, take an inch out, and Bondo it back together.” Using fiberfill and panty hose, they then built the shapes back up. “If you’re trying to re-create a bound chest, you can’t just take a chunk out and make it smaller. You have to imagine what it looks like if you smash a breast down–it goes in and then comes out at the sides.” Correct hip measurements were crucial, because “all of these dresses sat right on the hips.”
As early as 1900, Paul Poiret–who was “appalled at corsetry,” says Long–was designing dresses to fit the actual shape of women’s bodies. The CHS show includes one Poiret original, an orange gown with black sleeves and black-and-white embroidery; the dropped waists of most of the other dresses on display clearly demonstrate his influence. Some garments are even less structured: a hand-painted silk wrap from Liberty of London–purchased, according to historical society records, by Mrs. Bernard Duis, who wore it on a crossing on the Berengeria in 1923–is basically a giant square of fabric trimmed with heavy tassels, the weight of which holds the garment in place.
As for all those butchered mannequins, “We saved all the parts we cut from them in case we have to put them back together,” he says. “They’ll just be in storage, waiting for the next time they’re needed.”
