Bawdy Bodies: Satires of Unruly Women

Fashion

The Duchess of Devonshire was a woman of literary and musical accomplishment whose book The Sylph: A Novel (1779) mirrors many features of her own biography. She was equally in the spotlight for her flamboyant fashion, including exaggerated hair styles and enormous headdresses.

Satires and caricatures that generally targeted fashion mavens address anxieties surrounding physical transformation and shape shifting. The transformative nature of costume or dress, which shapes the contours of the body and impacts the wearer’s ability to move freely, is a theme explored in R. Rushworth’s caricature The Bum Shop. Rushforth shows a group of women whose figures are ridiculously proportioned. The women crowd a dress shop and clamor to adopt the faddish enhanced silhouettes by padding their hips and posteriors. In their vanity the shoppers conceal their deficiencies by humorously exaggerating their figures while devoting time and expense to chasing the current ideal.  

Anonymous
Inconvenience of Dress
Etching and engraving with hand coloring
Published May 19, 1786 by S.W. Fores
The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University

The pitfalls of adopting the latest fashion are illustrated in this image of a young woman struggling to feed herself despite the covering billowing over her bosom. Her derriere is similarly exaggerated to achieve the newly fashionable silhouette made possible by the “bum,” a roll of cushioning worn at the back of the waist. Just as the fashion victim’s chest and backside are padded, so too is her coiffure, which has been puffed into a high crest above her thin face. The rhyme below the image mocks her unnatural appearance, suggesting that, lest the viewer show concern for the woman’s ability to eat, her garments have transformed her into a bird, with a “crop” for food storage.

R. Rushworth, fl. 1785–1786 
The Bum Shop
Etching with hand coloring
Published July 11, 1785 by S.W. Fores
The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University

R. Rushworth offers a view into a “bum shop,” a retailer that specialized in the paddings worn under the back of dresses to create a full backside. The women shopping in “Derriere’s” shop have silhouettes that range from the already well endowed to thin and haggard, as indicated by the old, bare-chested woman at the center. The text under the image presents the fashion as a French invention, pointing out that the vanity of the women flies in the face of national morality.