On Tuesday 12 February 2008, Margo Anderson wrote: > This reconstruction isn't what I would describe as "provocative" by > modern standards! Just goes to show what to what lengths the media > will go to to sex things up.
True, it's not provocative by modern standards, but to be fair to the poor reporter consider this: if Viking women normally covered their breasts with at least two layers of clothing, having just a thin linen shift over them might register as "sexy" (In the same way that, at the height of the Victorian period, an unexpected amount of legshow when the woman was in day dress registered as "sexy.") Whether the single-layer-over-the-breasts look was unique to the kind of costume Larsson posits would depend on how common it really was for women other than slaves to wear only a single garment over the breasts. It might also depend on whether Viking women bound or otherwise wore undergarments that supported the breasts (something we really have no data on at present). -- Cathy Raymond <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> "You affect the world by what you browse."-- Tim Berners-Lee _______________________________________________ h-costume mailing list [email protected] http://mail.indra.com/mailman/listinfo/h-costume
