Clodagh Finn: Tailor clothes to fit the body, not the other way around

Here we are again with a return to the catwalk waif and the fallout in terms of body image that is certain to follow

Flat stomachs were the name of the game at Paris Fashion Show. Picture: AP Photo/Francois Mori

It feels like it’s time to revive the Short Skirt League. Bear with me now, this is not an argument for the micro-mini, more a plea to remember the ideals of an organisation, aka the rational dress movement, which argued clothes should serve the wearer, rather than the other way around.

Women might have cast off the whalebone corsets and Victorian underwear which, in some cases, weighed up to 14lbs, but sometimes you have to wonder if we are making any progress.

We know the deeply corrosive effect of the cult of skinny, yet here we are again talking about the return of wafer-thin models to high-profile catwalks and, worse, recalling the ‘heroin chic’ of the 1990s, that hideous term that glorified pale skin and emaciated features.

Let’s hope we are too drug-aware, if not body-aware, to allow that damaging trend take hold, although there is little doubt that thin is back, if indeed it ever went away. The statement fashion item on this year’s glitzy catwalks was not a dress, but the flat stomach, to quote fashion editor Jess Cartner-Morley’s wry observation.

“The red carpet was won not by a dress, but by a body,” she wrote from the Council of Fashion Designers of America awards in New York earlier this month. As she pointed out, actor Julia Fox wore a cutout dress that was mostly cutout, with a side order of dress. The star of the show was her carved-out mid-section, visible ribs, and sinewy glutes.

Model Bella Hadid made an impact in this. Picture: Julien de Rosa/AFP via Getty Images

The same was true at Paris Fashion Week when fashion brand Coperni sprayed a white dress on to the body of model Bella Hadid. She came on to the stage wearing very brief briefs and stood for 15 minutes while a team from the fabric technology company Fabrican sprayed the outline of a dress on her body.

To be fair, it was a magnificent stunt. And it offered a tantalising sci-fi peephole into the future of fashion. The spray-on dress was made of liquified wool, cotton, nylon, and cellulose. It evaporated when it made contact with the body, leaving behind a non-woven fabric.

Could we be buying aerosols rather than clothes in the future?

It is also true to say that the catwalk is to daily fashion what the north pole is to the south — a world apart — yet it still wields power.

The spray-on dress gimmick might have been worthy as a timely showcase for sustainable fashion, but in essence the lingering image was this: a hardly-there dress on a hardly-there body. It pains me to comment on another woman’s form, but it is important to speak out when fashion focuses its scissors on the body rather than the cloth.

That’s why I wish the Short Skirt League were still around. It would be fascinating to have the perspective of women who fought against the constricting nature of clothing. They might be amused to see the concern is no longer about too much clothing, but too little.

Though, they would surely be horrified to see that, now, instead of cutting the cloth to fit our bodies, we are tailoring our bodies to fit the cloth.

Yet, they may have something to teach us.

Let me introduce you to Belfast-born dress reformer and “Victorian troublemaker” Florence Wallace Pomeroy. She was born in Malone House in Belfast in 1843 and became Lady Harberton when she married the 6th Viscount Harberton just before her 18th birthday in 1861.

A few decades and four children later, she became leader of the Short Skirt League, an organisation whose members hitched up their skirts by a scandalous five inches. It was a vital fashion concession if women were to enjoy cycling, then increasingly popular.

Florence was a keen cyclist and she encouraged others to enjoy the sport. Her campaign hit the headlines when the landlady of an inn in Surrey in the UK refused to serve her because she was wearing her “rational” cycling gear of baggy knickerbockers. Florence sued but lost her case as she had been served in another room. The publicity, though, garnered a lot of public support.

By 1883, Florence was one of the leaders of the Rational Dress Society, which protested that wearing tight corsets, high heels and heavy skirts stopped women from taking exercise.

Charlotte Wilde, Oscar’s wife, was also a member. In a lecture to the society in 1888, entitled Clothed in Our Right Minds, she said women should be allowed to wear “divided skirts” because, as God had given women two legs, they should have the freedom to use them.

The Rational Dress Society also argued that women unencumbered by hobbling fashions would be much freer to take part more fully in society.

Florence Wallace Pomeroy: A member of the Rational Dress Society.

If you think all of that is old hat, here’s the bit that resonates so loudly today. “The Rational Dress Society,” went its rallying cry, “protests against the introduction of any fashion in dress that either deforms the figure, impedes the movements of the body, or in any way tends to injure the health.”

Florence and her members fought the strangleholds imposed by the Victorian corset and crinoline, but at least they were dealing with an outside force — the design of clothes.

In recent, and supposedly more enlightened, times, fashion has done something far more sinister by targeting the design of the body itself. How size zero even became a thing is, in large part, due to a fashion industry that designs clothes — low-rise jeans, micro minis, crop tops — that look good only on the thin and the curveless.

If you are born that way, embrace your natural shape. Most of us, however, are not but we have internalised the message that fashion favours the fat-free.

Or, to use the words of those wise Victorians, we have embraced a fashion that “deforms the figure” (think dieting to fit into the LBD this Christmas), “impedes the movements of the body” (think what happens when the LBD diet fails) and “tends to injure the health” (revisit the first two parentheses).

There has been a very welcome move away from the tyranny of thin. We’ve seen a surge in plus-size (role) models alongside a vocal body positivity movement.

Yet, we find ourselves here again with a return to the catwalk waif and the fallout in terms of body image that is certain to follow. Have no doubt about that; these images will certainly have an impact. Keep your eye on TikTok and see how a catwalk craze today translates into the weight-loss hashtags (and eating disorder misery) of tomorrow.

True, fashion is cyclical. It was only a matter of time before the bad old YK2 trends came back to haunt us. And to return to the wisdom of the Wildes, Oscar this time: “Indeed, what is a fashion really? A fashion is merely a form of ugliness so absolutely unbearable that we have to alter it every six months!”

Clodagh Finn’s new column, An Irishwoman’s Diary, starts on Saturday, December 10, in the Irish Examiner