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History and Fashion

The Arnolfini Portrait by Jan van Eyck depicts a fashionable man and woman in the 15th century.

Adam and Eve from the Vienna Diptych by Hugo van der Goes. Eve's protruding stomach is typical of nudes in teh 15th century.

The thin hourglass figure, seen as the bodily ideal of today, has not always been the desired body shape. The ideal body type as envisioned by members of society has changed throughout history. Stone age venus figurines show the earliest body type preference: dramatic steatopygia. The emphasis on protruding belly, breasts, and buttocks is likely a result of both the aesthetic of being well fed and aesthetic of being fertile, traits that were more difficult to achieve at the time. In the sculpture from Classical Greece and Ancient Rome the female bodies are more tubular and regularly proportioned. There is essentially no emphasis given to any particular body part, not the breasts, buttocks, or belly. Part of this may be due simply to the fact that the artistic technique developed enough that naturalistic humans could be represented.

Moving forward there is more evidence that fashion somewhat dictated what people believed were the proper female body proportions. This is the case because the body is primarily seen through clothing, which always changes the way the underlying structures are conceived. The first representations of truly fashionable women appear in the 14th century. Between the 14th and 16th centuries in northern Europe, bulging bellies were again desirable, however the stature of the rest of the figure was generally thin. This is most easily visible in paintings of nudes from the time. When looking at clothed images, the belly is often visible through a mass of otherwise concealing, billowing, loose robes. Since the stomach was the only visible anatomical feature, it became exaggerated in nude depictions while the rest of the body remained minimal. In southern Europe, around the time of the renaissance, this was also true. Though the classical aesthetic was being revived and very closely studied, the art produced in the time period was influenced by both factors. This resulted in a beauty standard that reconciled the two aesthetics by using classically proportioned figures who had non-classical amounts of flesh and soft, padded skin.

This portrait by Caspar Netscher is an example of 17th century women's fashion.

The Three Graces is a typical Rubens nude depicting 3 women that appear fleshy yet not particularly fat.

In the nude paintings of the 17th century, such as those by Rubens, the naked women appear quite fat. Upon closer inspection however, most of the women have fairly normal statures, Rubens has simply painted their flesh with rolls and ripples that otherwise would not be there. This is likely a reflection of the female style of the day: a long, cylindrical, corseted gown with, rippling satin accents. Thus Rubens' women have a tubular body with rippling embellishments . While the corset continued to be fashionable into the 18th century, it shortened, became more conical, and consequently began to emphasize the waist. It also lifted and separated the breasts as opposed to the 17th century corsets which compressed and minimized the breasts. Consequently, depictions of nude women in the 18th century tend to have a very narrow waist and high, distinct breasts, almost as if they were wearing an invisible corset. La maja desnuda is a clear example of this aesthetic. The 19th century maintained the general figure of the 18th century. Examples can be seen in the works of many contemporary artists, both academic artists, such as Cabanel, Ingres, and Bouguereau, and impressionists, such as Degas, Renoir, and Toulouse-Lautrec. As the 20th century began, the rise of athletics resulted in a drastic slimming of the female figure. This culminated in the 1920s flapper look, which has informed modern fashion ever since .

The last 100 years envelop the time period in which that overall body type has been seen as attractive, though there have been small changes within the period as well. The 1920s was the time in which the overall silhouette of the ideal body slimmed down. There was dramatic flattening of the entire body resulting in a more youthful aesthetic. As the century progressed, the ideal size of both the breasts and buttocks increased. From the 1950s to 1960 that trend continued with the interesting twist of cone shaped breasts as result of the popularity of the bullet bra. In the 1960s, the invention of the miniskirt as well as the increased acceptability of pants for women, prompted the idealization of the long leg that has lasted until today. Following the invention of the push-up bra in the 1970s the ideal breast has been a rounded, fuller, and larger breast. In the past 20 years the average American bra size has increased from 34B to 34DD . Additionally, the ideal figure has favored an ever lower waist-hip ratio, especially with the advent and progression of digital editing software such as Adobe Photoshop.