Ivy Leaf's Diary

2010

 

 

Happy New Year

 

 

 

January 2010:  A New Year, New Opportunities

 

 

The elegant lady wears a satin combination of an American Camp corset and a Swiss Desiré brassiere.

We have so many plans for the coming year. Buoyed up by the success of the calendar, we really want to use the Ivy Leaf Collection to its full potential. The Collection needs to be modelled and probably thinned out a little. We have many duplicate garments that should be sold off, and some of such rarity that they really should belong in museums for the benefit of others to enjoy.

 

Several years ago, we lamented the passing of the foundation garment, little realising that the 'shaper' was about to hit the shelves of the fashionable stores. On one hand, our few remaining stalwart corsetieres struggle on, with our Liverpool friend selling only three corsets this last year, but our Eastbourne contact measured an encouraging 12 clients. The former commented on how poorly the corsets in the calendar were fitted. She is absolutely correct, however, we only had a limited range available (there are a million more female shapes than our motley collection of 500 garments can match). Also, modern women are bigger than their sisters of four decades ago. We did our best and had a lot of laughs, but this year, we want to do better. In the last two days, apropos of nothing, we overheard two women at two separate parties commenting on their shapewear. One mentioned that shapewear was part of her standard wardrobe and another commented on the feeling of blood rushing back into compressed spaces after her night-time escape from its powerful embrace. Comments like this, I have not heard in many decades. Perhaps the '20-teens' herald a new era.

 

Indeed perhaps they do. There is any amount of literature on the correlation of social harmony and tight underwear. One can only hope that the return of half-decent corsetry heralds something better than the offerings of the last decade!

 

Let us start the year with a couple of charming offerings from a web page that we are currently developing called "Making the Calendar."

 

 

Annual Calendar Awards:

 

Our calendar was entered for a competition that I barely registered at the time, the British Annual Calendar Award. We received a note two weeks ago asking four of our team to attend the 'Worshipful Company of Stationers' by St. Paul's Cathedral in London. My husband, who loathes London, encouraged me and three of the models to attend, however, it was decided that my husband, myself, another of the models and the lady whose house had been used as the set should attend. It meant an over-night trip plus, I could predict, an incessant series of husband-like rants:- "HOW much for a cup of coffee?" and the like. I don't know what we were expecting, but we didn't really imagine that we would be competing with the top national calendars! Predictably we failed to gain any award, however, we were congratulated on getting the calendar displayed. Only 150 calendars out of 500 entrants got that far so we were rather pleased. The wine and canapes, were not only delicious and plentiful, but free (since we were a charity) and served by charming young ladies. Even my husband was impressed!

 

 

February 2010:

 

Oh dear! We must apologise for the lack of updates recently. This is partly due to travel (when we could), incessant snow (when we couldn't) and numerous invitations. The latter are part and parcel of village life, however, the Calendar has attracted rather some attention and we have been invited to speak at functions in June, July and September. In addition, it seems that Leeds University has a course in which textiles, fabrics, fashion and corsetry figure prominently. We have had numerous enquiries about the Collection in particular and corsetry in general. It is very gratifying to be part of this foundation renaissance and we hope that we can make the most of this opportunity.

 

Meanwhile plans proceed apace. We hope to photograph the collection as worn by real women and to begin an entirely new project called "What Lies Beneath!" Perhaps this might be the subject for a 2011 calendar?

 

 

St. Valentine's Day:

 

St. Valentine's Day is another occasion that might as well have been invented by shop-keepers to part us from our hard earned cash. The link to romance, however, which is always appreciated, seems to have been a 14th century invention of Geoffrey Chaucer. My husband read this text and commented that if separating us from our cash  was worthy of note, then every day should be called Bankers' Day! But I digress. Across the country, roses and cards will be given and expensive meals eaten. Amongst the younger couples, saucy undies or night attire might be be presented to a blushing wife for one night of passion before, like the others before it, it gets consigned to the back of the 'not for normal use' drawer. One of my husband's old aunts had one of those drawers that, on her death, was found to contain an outrageously diaphanous nightie, a maternity corset and some old and rather stretched girdles that seemed to have been used for spare parts in later years. Indeed, the chronology of the last sentence might be exactly correct. It was this very lady who once commented "I owe my hips to Darwin and my waist to Spirella", however, no Spirella foundations were ever recovered from her house. Perhaps they had become too expensive, or possibly she was echoing a remark made about Mae West by an unkind, if truthful reporter. "Mae owed her figure to the Spirella corset company!" Mae's Teutonic ancestry was blamed for her lifelong struggle to keep her waist and hips under control.

 

 

March 2010:

 

We have been doing our annual audit of the Ivy Leaf Collection. There's well over 500 garments and the statistics are interesting. Just over half the garments are white, a third are variously tea rose, pink, flesh, skin-tone or beige, and about a sixth black. There's some blue foundations from the lovers of that colour, the French, and some unlovely patterns that Marks and Spencers thought would sell in the early 1980's. They didn't. A quarter of the collection are girdles, a quarter are corsets from conventional to bizarrely complex and a third are generically brassieres, although this covers corselettes, torselettes, all-in-ones, guêpières, basques, bustiers and combinaires. The brassieres run the gamut from long-line, midi-line, short-line, cathedral, bullet, uplift, minimising, laced-back and laced-side.

 

The statistics don't actually mean anything, in fact they are misleading. They are simply the result of 40 years of eclectic collecting, gifts and the residue from some corsetieres and corset shops. Inevitably the odd sizes and unpopular styles last into history. The popular fashions just wear out and are usually consigned to the dustbin. After all, for the last 20 years, brassieres have outsold lower foundations by more than 99 to 1. We always enjoy the audit and inevitably we discover garments that we had completely forgotten. We hope to share far more of the collection with you all this year that we have done in the past. The 2010 calendar was but a taster.

 

A charming advertisement passed our way recently. In the 1930's, the corset houses were remarkably candid and slogans such as "Are any of your friends inclined to be stout?" (to which the answer is - "probably yes, but if I want them to stay friends, I might not mention it!") filled the columns of the woman's weeklies. However, the Spirella advert depicted here coins a new phrase "Figure Tragedy." A walk along any street in Britain these days will explain exactly what that means. The advert is actually rather clever, combining a slim maiden in a new-fangled automobile with the ever present fear of curves, bulges and, without the assistance of Spirella (like some corsetry RAC), ultimate figure tragedy would follow.