Corsages Are Coming Back in Flower : Return of Romance May Mark Return of Old Favorite

In recent years only Daughters of the American Revolution and high school prom girls have kept up the tradition of women as walking vases.

During DAR Continental Congresses no orchid in town is safe. And in the spring, high school girls swap their jeans for bare shoulders, long skirts and corsages for one brief night, turning hotel ballrooms into moving gardens.

In the ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s, a woman would just as soon appear at a party or even an important date without a slip as without a corsage. It’s difficult to credit now, but once suitors impoverished themselves to give their girls (as they were then called) a great good time.

Small Reward

Paying for both theater tickets, the entire restaurant bill or drinks at a nightclub was not enough--males also had to ante up for a corsage. Their reward--paltry though it might have been--came in pinning the corsage on the appreciative girlfriend.

If the girl was bold or an announcement imminent, and the parents in the other room, the boyfriend might also have received a kiss in return.

In those times parents encouraged the sending and acceptance of corsages on the theory that their daughters would not snuggle close enough to get into trouble for fear of bruising the flowers. Whether they were that much of a deterrent is unknown.

(Today’s prom girls, being bolder, have solved that problem by asking for wrist corsages for dances, the only occasions for which they’re apt to be bedecked.)

In case you’re too young to remember, corsages were once also de rigueur for women speakers or the wives of speakers at luncheon clubs. The number of flowers that gave their lives in order that Eleanor Roosevelt might bloom must have been staggering. Surely they died a useful death in helping her look like a traditional president’s wife while she delivered her pioneering messages about the injustices of the times.

As late as Pat Nixon’s tenure as first lady, an orchid corsage served as a badge of respect--though in one picture she has only three orchid blooms as opposed to the seven or eight blossoming on Gertrude Carraway of New Bern, N.C., the 1955 DAR president general.

During the last decades--probably beginning in the ‘60s when women were liberated from such frills as bows and lipstick and enchained into paying half the check--interest in corsages withered.

But with the return to romance--in movies, clothes, parties and such--we may be seeing the budding of a new crop of corsages.

“Body flowers,” as Bette O’Connell of Washington’s Caruso Florists calls corsages and all other wearable flower arrangements, are beginning to flourish. “Used to be that corsages were only for grandmother’s birthdays and proms,” she says, “but this season, beginning last September, we’ve been getting many orders for other occasions. We’re even having orders for mini-corsages for grammar-school children. For them we use mini-carnations.”

Florists’ Transworld Delivery--the “Flowers-by-Wire” folks--are more likely to bring bouquets, arrangements and potted plants, says Judy Yovanovich, FTD spokeswoman.

From her observation, “body flowers are thriving, but I’m not sure about traditional pin-on corsages, except for mothers of the bride and bridegroom. I think women are more likely to wear flowers entwined in their hair.”

That may be all very well for San Franciscans. But in Washington, a rose is a rose is a rose, and a corsage is meant to go close to the heart.