"Abel, Cynthia" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote
<snip>
From the few pics and online preview, I'm guessing though, as with Sense
and Sensibility, the costume designers were ordered to remove several
authentic underlayers (take a look at the fashion plates from
Heideloff's Gallery of Fashion to see what I mean), to make the more
fashionable female characters fall more in line with today's narrow
arrow aesthetic. Jenny Bevan, the costume designer for S&S complained
that she and her crew had to remove several underlayers of the female
characters costumes to meet today's aesthetic as some unnamed
powers-that-be, insisted the original authentic designs made the
actresses look too fat.
Northanger Abbey(a BBC production of almost 20 years ago)is another DVD
to check out for the fashions of the last few years of the 18th century.
A republication of at least some of the plates in color from Heideloff's
"Gallery of Fashion"(are you listening Dover Publications?)is long
overdue.
Cindy Abel
Somewhere, the idea seems to have arisen that Empire line was slim, when
in fact it's really quite puffy, compared with the corseted line that
went before. It's just that it's columnar. I suspect the aesthetic of
the day was as my husband once said about early medieval unbelted styles
- "fits where it touches, and whether it's attractive or not depends on
*where* it touches". The column may be wide, but the point is not to
have bulges.
Jean
--
Jean Waddie
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