Sex and Fashion of Historic Note

Enter, if you will, into a bygone era of fashion, a time of bonnets and bloomers, bustles and bosom amplifiers.

Your guide is Delores Heller, the 76-year-old former costume supervisor of the Kern County Museum in Bakersfield. Heller, after 45 years as a bookkeeper, decided 16 years ago to turn her lifelong interest in sewing into a new vocation.

She has become an expert in textiles and has delivered more than 600 lectures on the history of dress. Her topic:

“The History of Fashion, With an Accent on Women’s Undergarments.”

This week Heller addressed the Santa Clarita Valley Historical Society, a cheery group of local preservationists who restore historic buildings and collect artifacts reflecting the valley’s rich frontier past.

Heller last addressed the society in 1983 and was asked back by popular demand. She was almost as popular as the society’s programs on the St. Francis Dam Disaster, which swept more than 600 victims to their deaths in the 1920s.

Even in history, sex and violence sells.

Seated on metal folding chairs at the society’s headquarters in the century-old Saugus Train Station, 38 listeners heard Heller chronicle the fickle course of fashion. She was dressed as a bloomer girl, circa 1910, in black bloomers, white middy blouse and black hose.

Only her gray Nikes placed her in 1990.

Among the more intriguing items she pulled from four suitcases packed with chemises, petticoats and step-ins was a bosom amplifier. The women in the audience, many dressed in jeans, baggy sweaters and sweat shirts, winced slightly as Heller held up the device.

The bosom amplifiers, as the name implies, were intended to increase the prominence of cleavage. Worn in the late 1800s, they were wrapped tightly about the lower chest, collecting what nature had contributed into a more dramatically centralized location (foreshadowing Frederick’s of Hollywood by a half-dozen generations).

“They had gadgets for everything,” Heller observed, deadpan.

The amplifier was not much to look at, at least while not in use. It was just a band of cloth, much like another garment with the exact opposite function.

“One extreme to the other,” Heller said of the whims of fashion. “If in the ‘20s you had a breast, they put a bandeau on you.”

A bandeau, which squeezed the breasts flat, was worn during the Flapper Era, making women look like Peter Pan. “If you had anything growing, they put you in a bandeau,” Heller said. The audience chuckled.

Along with her audience, Heller was clearly amused by the fashions of yesteryear.

How could women put up with such things? Everyone asked themselves that question once or twice that night.

But Heller also appreciates some of the values which helped create the fashions which seem so silly today. Consider the calash, a large bonnet often worn in the morning. Looking like the top of an old baby carriage, the calash surrounded the face.

The audience giggled as she donned her calash and playfully pulled the drawstring up and down, making it look like her head was stuck in a bellows. But from head-on, it was supposed to create a flattering effect.

“It was worn in the morning,” she explained, “to frame a woman’s face, which always makes a woman more attractive.”

She then broke the magic by noting that Marie Antoinette wore a calash. Look where it got her .

As she displayed garment after garment, it appeared Heller was not speaking so much about fashion as the enslavement of women. Consider the layers of fabric encasing a woman at the turn of the century: a long chemise, a tight corset, drawers, up to four petticoats and, finally, a dress, generally to the ankles.

Even at rest, a woman was condemned to a fashion-inspired bondage. A woman’s nightshirt covered everything from ankle to neckline. A man’s nightshirt stopped at the knees and had a slight slit for ease of movement.

“Now that was not equal rights,” Heller said, holding up nightshirts for each sex. When women finally demanded the vote and sought their rights, they may have had nightshirts on their minds, she hinted.

“This is where I feel the equal rights thing started.”

But Heller also indicated a slight sense of nostalgia for the days when her bloomer girl outfit was considered a liberated innovation.

The clothes, even the silly ones, were often beautiful, lovingly detailed with embroidery and lace.

Will future generations say as much for Jordache and L.A. Gear?

“Of course, everything a women did in those days--it was handwork--was beautifully done,” Heller said.

She held up a white petticoat with bands of lace and crochet.

“Oh, my gosh,” blurted out a girl in the audience. “That’s pretty.”