Reviewed by:

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

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...

审阅者：

• 塑造女性气质：早期现代英格兰的基础服装、身体和女性莎拉·A·本德尔 (Sarah A. Bendall)
• 马丁·汤普森

莎拉·本德尔 (Sarah Bendall) 提出塑造女性气质，作为对服装历史不合时宜的叙述的修订，迄今为止，这些叙述一直在塑造基础服装 - 结构性物品。为了实现时尚雕塑轮廓而穿的衣服——作为父权压迫的工具。本德尔将这些想法的起源置于十八世纪和十九世纪（以及这些时期的历史学术），概述了她重写英国基础服装历史的雄心勃勃的计划。

十六、十七世纪基础服装的出现和早期演变的丰富历史不仅揭示了传统档案的局限性，而且还利用实验性的历史服装重建来质疑和激活现有的文本、视觉和材料来源，同时提出经过深思熟虑且有条理（以及可复制）的策略来填补空白。就像基础服装本身一样，正如本德尔在不同点上所解释的那样，她的实验性重建所提供的见解并不局限于服装的单一初始层——它在整个过程中以不同的方式被运用来帮助塑造、支持和展示本德尔的论点。这一点在 150 张彩色插图中得到了很大的帮助，这些插图将当代木刻、版画和绘画的复制品与现存罕见的基础服装实例和她自己的实验性重建的现代照片放在一起。

第一章按时间顺序概述了 16 世纪和 17 世纪的结构时尚，使本德尔能够将身体、面包卷和法丁格尔置于更广泛的早期现代和欧洲背景中，并允许她在随后的主题中继续进行章节。第一部分的基本论点是，早期现代话语“将基础服装与它们所穿着或隐藏的身体部位混为一谈”（第 19 页）。本德尔利用各种视觉、文本和物质证据，阐释了现代早期话语、服装和身体相互塑造的方式——无论是字面意义上的还是隐喻意义上的。 [结束第216页]

在建立了身体和基础服装的概念融合之后，本德尔探讨了精英宫廷美学在重塑 16 世纪女性身体方面所发挥的作用。 “宫廷生活的表演性意味着所有的行为和目光都具有解释性”（第 58 页）这一前提是本德尔讨论时装创新如何与精英女性气质观念的连续性和变化联系起来的基础。第 2 章中提供的一些视觉证据（例如伊丽莎白一世的迪奇利和无敌舰队肖像）以及讨论的概念（例如sprezzatura），在谈到自我塑造的想法时，威胁要重申经过充分排练的参与条款。然而，本德尔的方法论提供了令人耳目一新的见解，有助于为现有的读物增添细微差别和微妙之处。例如，深入了解欧洲对皇室的影响有助于我们理解时尚如何成为整个宫廷的象征——本德尔表明，这种联系是由精英本身动员起来的，但也被社会其他阶层用来批评它。< /span>

第三章和第四章继续着眼于社会上层人士之外的领域，探讨熟练工匠制作基础服装以及中产阶级和普通女性的消费，从而扩大了争论的范围。遗嘱认证文件和收据等来源辅以本德尔重建的见解，高质量照片帮助本德尔展示“学习阅读”材料的过程“[……]失去隐性知识的种族”的来源（第133页）。这些章节热衷于赞扬生产者和“精于算计的消费者”的“物质素养”（第152页），从而赋予早期现代女性操纵她们在严格的社会和性别规范所决定的社会中的地位的能力。在第五章中，本德尔进一步发展了“夸张的神话[​​……]仍然普遍存在并应用于十六和十七世纪的身体”（第153页）与基础服装及其穿着者的物质和生活现实之间的对比。 .