Shaping Femininity: Foundation Garments, the Body and Women in Early Modern England by Sarah A. Bendall (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Shaping Femininity: Foundation Garments, the Body and Women in Early Modern England by Sarah A. Bendall
• Martin Thompson

Bendall, Sarah A., Shaping Femininity: Foundation Garments, the Body and Women in Early Modern England, London, Bloomsbury, 2022; paperback; pp. 338; 150 colour illustrations; R.R.P £27.99; ISBN 9781350164116.

Sarah Bendall presents Shaping Femininity as a revision of anachronistic narratives of clothing history that have up until this point cast foundation garments—structural items of clothing worn to achieve fashionable sculptural silhouettes—as tools of patriarchal oppression. Situating the origin of these ideas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (and historical scholarship on these periods), Bendall outlines her ambitious project of rewriting the history of the foundation garment in England.

Not only does this rich history of the emergence and early evolution of foundation garments in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries identify the limitations of the traditional archive, but it also uses experimental historical dress reconstruction to interrogate and enliven existing textual, visual, and material sources while proposing considered and methodical (as well as replicable) strategies for filling in the gaps. Like the foundation garment itself, as Bendall explains at various points, the insight provided by her experimental reconstructions is not consigned to the single, initial layer of the outfit—it is employed variously throughout to help shape, support, and showcase Bendall’s argument. This is not insignificantly aided by 150 colour illustrations that place reproductions of contemporary woodcuts, prints, and paintings alongside modern photographs of both rare extant examples of foundation garments and her own experimental reconstructions.

The first chapter provides a chronological overview of structural fashions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, allowing Bendall to situate bodies, bum rolls, and farthingales in their broader early modern and European contexts and permitting her to proceed thematically in the subsequent chapters. The essential argument of this first section is that early modern discourse ‘conflated foundation garments with the parts of the body that they clothed or concealed’ (p. 19). Using a variety of visual, textual, and material evidence, Bendall illustrates the ways in which discourse, garments, and bodies shaped one another—both literally and metaphorically—in the early modern period. [End Page 216]

Having established the conceptual conflation of body and foundation garment, Bendall explores the role that elite court aesthetics played in reshaping the female body in the sixteenth century. The premise that ‘the performativity of court life meant that all actions and gazes were interpretive’ (p. 58) is the basis of Bendall’s discussion of how innovations in fashionable dress are linked to both continuities and changes in ideas about elite femininity. Some of the visual evidence presented in Chapter 2 (for example, the Ditchley and Armada portraits of Elizabeth I), as well as the concepts discussed (such as sprezzatura), threaten to restate the well-rehearsed terms of engagement when it comes to ideas of self-fashioning. However, Bendall’s methodology provides refreshing insight that helps to add nuance and subtlety to existing readings. For example, insight into the European influences on the royal court helps us understand how fashion became an emblem for the court in general—an association that Bendall shows was mobilised by the elite itself but also appropriated by other sections of society to critique it.

Continuing to look beyond the upper echelons of society, Chapters 3 and 4 expand the scope of the debate by exploring the production of foundation garments by skilled artisans, and their consumption by middling and common women. Sources such as probate documents and receipts are supplemented with insight from Bendall’s reconstructions, and high-quality photographs help Bendall demonstrate the process of ‘learning to read’ material sources for ‘[t]races of […] lost tacit knowledge’ (p. 133). These chapters are keen to give credit to the ‘material literacy’ of both producers and ‘calculated consumers’ (p. 152), thereby attributing early modern women with the agency to manipulate their position in a society dictated by strict social and gender norms. In Chapter 5, Bendall further develops the contrast between the ‘exaggerated myths […] still commonly perpetuated and applied to bodies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’ (p. 153) and the material and lived realities of foundation garments and their wearers...