Ivy Leaf's Diary

2024

 

Wishing all our Readers a Happy New Year

 

January

 

Here we go again in our 22nd year.

 

We received a large number of cartoons from a reader who had amassed his own collection. It does seem that the 'Bamford style' British seaside postcard humour is largely appreciated by the British, however, many other cartoons are often duplicated in French and German. Certainly, the prevalence of bed-bugs in the early 20th century was a pan-European phenomenon (much as it is today!).

 

 

 

 

What with the Post Office scandal in Britain, the fines they are likely to face and the worried, highly paid executives looking up countries from which they can't be extradited, it reminded me of a peculiar episode regarding a Spirella stereo viewer.

 

 

November 2013:  An amazing thing!!

 

We took the chance recently to spend a few days in the east of Holland with my sister-in-law. For a couple of years when we lived abroad, we used her home as our contact address since our house was being rented out. On arrival, she produced a small parcel and told us that it had arrived by post a few days ago. I was mystified. I had ordered nothing, and as far as I knew, that address had been removed from all our correspondence, both written and electronic. It was about the size of a wallet, but heavier.

 

I opened the parcel that was very carefully wrapped and discovered to my amazement, a vintage Spirella stereo viewer complete with the classic Spirella stereo slides.

 

I remember ordering such an article many years ago and, on careful inspection of the postmarks on the envelope, discovered that the viewer had been posted in 2005, over eight years ago!! The package had been re-stamped and franked and carefully re-labelled. Indeed, I remember the disappointment when the viewer failed to turn up, but living overseas, this was not uncommon. I suspect that the stamps intended for air mail were insufficient and the package went sea mail. Frankly, you might as well then throw it away since sea mail can take years even these days. It must have arrived at my husband's work place who decided to re-direct it to our last known address. How amazing!

 

It has, of course, given my husband a fantastic new idea about the forthcoming photo-shoot and he hopes to produce some stereo pairs to recreate the feeling of those bygone days!

I would like to thank the reader who has been providing so many cartoons recently for reminding of this episode.

Our model looked at the stereo pair through the Spirella viewer.

"Oh Dear; my boobs really do stick a lot!"

 

 

February

 

For those of you who like calendars, here is one for 2024.

 

 

 

 

March

 

We must apologise for the long gap in site updates; we have been travelling the way that older retired folk do. Recovering from an astonishing 13-hour time zone change, we are only just now returning to normal.

 

We have been asked "What was the difference between a 'roll on' and a 'pull-on' girdle?" The answer that we provided was

"A 'roll-on' was originally a term for a girdle without any bones that could literally be rolled onto or off the body. A 'pull on' referred mainly to the traditional boned girdle with an entry zip, altogether a firmer garment. The 'roll on' was designed for the youthful figure requiring little or no control. Latterly, 'roll on' became a generic term for a girdle. Wearing a girdle was less fashionable in the late 1960s so women preferred not to use the G word and 'roll on' sounded more youthful."

 

There is a section on girdles generally in the web-site, however, in our slowly developing book 'My Girdle's Killing Me and other feminine follies', we have this section:

 

 

The text in full can be found here.

 

Easter Weekend and the clocks go forward one hour, hurray! It gives the immediate illusion that Spring is here although the incessant rain suggests otherwise!

 

 

 April

We have frequently referred to the elderly lady (way back in the 1950s and 60s) whose delicate outer appearance belied the rigidity of her corsetted torso.

 

A wispy old lady in floating chiffons and delicate lace, her hair shone like the spun silk of her favourite dresses. It seemed as though this ephemeral piece of thistledown would blow away in the breeze. It came, therefore as a shock to my husband, the first time he helped her into her chair. Aware as most men are of the softness of the female form, he was struck by the incongruous rigidity and hardness of her frame. I had already seen her corsets on a previous visit and knew what was coming. The poor old dear was anchored to ‘terra firma’ by no less than three pounds of Spencer’s firmest surgical corsets.

Although in her 70’s, she possessed a slim and elegant figure. Her clothes were her extravagance, old-fashioned, yet tasteful and expensive confections of patterned chiffons and silks. Her hair was like a spun silver web and her stocking seams ruler straight down to her court shoes. Only the complete rigidity of her torso indicated that she was corsetted from shoulders to thigh. She made no secret of the fact, and would jokingly say to younger women how Spencer had looked after her figure tapping her unyielding stomach.

 

This rigidity was very apparent to our friends who modelled for our calendars.

Regard the following film clip on the right where the young lad puts his arm around the lady in blue (aunt, granny?) and blatantly feels her rather obvious foundation garment (click on the picture).

 

 

 

I have asked this question before in 2021, but who is the lady with the very distinct profile attending to the Queen Mother at a fashion show in 1954?

 

Thank you very much to the eagle-eyed Royalist who has identified the striking lady above. She is Pamela Margaret Elizabeth Berry, Baroness Hartwell (née Smith, 1914 – 1982), an English socialite, known for her political salon. She also presided over the Incorporated Society of London Fashion Designers and was active in the British section of the Franco-British Council, working to promote British fashions internationally, hence her presence with the Queen Mother during fashion shows.

 

 May

Chocolates and Corsets

 

We were watching a fascinating TV programme yesterday regarding the famous cake shops in Vienna, Austria. The cakes looked fantastic (both my husband and I are chocoholics) and we added Vienna once more to our 'bucket liszt'. It reminded my husband of a business trip that saw him change 'planes in Vienna in the late 1960s. There in the arrival hall was a display of the most formidable foundation garments; satin, satin and more satin, bones, lacing, buckles, every artifice to control the burgeoning abdomen was present and on display. Was this display a warning about over-indulgence in the cake shops or a rather subtle advertisement for the quality and calorific value of the city's apfelstrudel and other delicacies. I had also visited Vienna but as a student and, of course, we all headed for the cafes in the Innere Stadt or number one district. The cakes were delicious but it was the clientele that fascinated me. Elderly, stout women of a certain class all dressed in that ultra-conservative, expensive and slightly old-fashioned tweedy style with their immovably lacquered hair adorned with a Tyrolean hat complete with feathers. Today, you would imagine blouses and jackets straining their buttons to contain the sugar-fuelled avoirdupois, but not back then. Their corsets contained their flesh and their clothes fitted their corsets perfectly; that's what corsetry was all about.

 

Oddly enough, in Malmö, Sweden, the Spirella corset shop on the Gustav Adolfs Torg, a street famous for its corsetry emporia, was replaced years ago by a chocolate shop.

These days, corsets and chocolate don't go together, but in the 1960s they did!

 

 

A reader commented that somewhere on our web-site was a corset or girdle advertisement that encouraged hearty eating since the foundation was sufficiently robust to control the figure. I do remember this advert, however, I cannot find it. Help!

Fantastic!! A reader pointed me in the right direction, it's on our Berlei page. Thank you so much.

The 'will power' advert is a classic. You dispense with will power and eat as much as you like, secure in the knowledge that your Berlei panty-girdle will return you to that perfect size.

 

 

 

 

Below we see five photographs of Mexican actress Maty Huitrón taken by photographer Nacho Lopez in 1953. Miss Huitrón is provocatively dressed on purpose in order to gather attention from passers-by. There is speculation as to whether she wore a corset under that suit. She was very shapely and would not normally wear a corset, however, there are strange outlines and embossing on her suit. She would wear a girdle normally, but was she wearing a corset or a tight basque for the photo-shoot? One might ask the same question about Jayne Mansfield (right) in the film 'The Girl Can't Help It' (1956).

 

 

 

A question for you engineers out there...

This is a picture of ladies working at the Royal Worcester Corset Company of Massachusetts, USA.

What are the machines that they are using? Are they machines for sewing or for putting in the eyelets, one of the more critical aspects of corset construction?

 

What a long month May is! My husband complains that it takes 31 days for his pension to arrive. February is far better with only 28 days (or 29 this year). He even managed to moan about that. I fear he is becoming a grumpy old man. Mind you, there's plenty to be grumpy about. Elections on both sides of the pond. A friend of ours, who being a teacher is strongly socialist, put on Facebook "We now have a chance to get rid of those scheming, self-centred, corrupt idiots." My husband suggested "Of course, let's elect a different set of scheming, self-centred, corrupt idiots!"

 

 

June

 

Today is the first meteorological day of summer. This means that the weather forecasters start summer today, but for everybody else, summer begins on the solstice, the 20th June this year. It seem unfair that these somewhat erratic forecasters should enjoy 19 days of summer before the rest of us.

 

We have just noticed that the links to Ivy's Diary for the years 2003 - 2007 were missing. We have re-instated these and, I must admit, they make good reading not having seen them for many years.

 

We were tasked with composing an essay on the relative merits of Sears and Custom Maid long-leg panty-girdles.

 

 

With all that is going on in the world at the moment - elections, football, wars and the threat of nuclear annihilation, it is refreshing that three major UK newspapers chose to lead this morning with Cara Delevingne wearing a Simone Rocha creation that is a tribute to that corset fanatic, Jean Paul Gaultier.

Back in the old days, some older women would wear two pairs of stockings, a pair of the hated surgical stockings disguised by more fashionable stockings worn over the top. This required more suspenders than the normal six and this could be achieved by using extra clip-on suspenders or by wearing two garments. One old lady hoped that wearing a girdle over her corset might conceal the engineering of her surgical corset embossed on her skirt (it didn't!).

I wonder how many pairs of stockings Miss Delevingne wants to wear?

Historically, corsets tend to predominate in times of peace and vanish during times of war. Perhaps there is hope for us after all.

 

July

 

At weddings in the 1960s, I was always amazed at the transformation of the older women present. For sure, everybody dresses in their finest but the transformation of the women could be quite spectacular. Bosoms were lifted to unaccustomed heights, waists were compressed by industrial strength elastic and sometimes that corset, consigned to the back of the drawer that really should have been consigned to the dustbin, is pressed into service. Women totter, mince and roll in their unaccustomed foundations. Aunties appear in a figure lost decades since, resplendent in patterned silk stretched almost to bursting point across formidably corsetted abdomens. Ian McRoberts sums it up very well in his memoirs:

 

"The stout matron grimaces rather than smiles. If you had seen the effort that it took her to lace tight that unaccustomed corset, you would not be surprised at her expression. Her eyes bulge, her bosom is hoisted inches higher than even Howard Hughes intended by the hip-quenching force of her formidably over-tightened stays. Her corsets have removed her feminine hips and she tapers like a female tent-peg into the arrow-head agony of her stilettos."

 

"Her spectacularly elevated bosom eclipsed the food on the table when she sat down to eat, a feat accomplished not without effort; both sitting and eating that is. Like her friend, her corsets were tightened to life-threatening levels. The groom secretly wondered (as all grooms do) if this was what the future held for his new bride."

 

  

 

This brings us to the whole point of this diatribe

 

 

 

 

September

 

 

Back onto the subject of PowerNet, we are most grateful to those readers who have helped us to add to our collection of these newsletters.

As far as we know, Lyn Locke and her partner Mike issued these newsletters from November 2001 (Vol. 1) to February 2008 (Vol. 73).

We are missing vols. 1 - 4; 6 - 11, 64, 66 and any others that were published between Sept 2007 (vol. 70) and Feb 2008 (vol. 73). Please can you help to fill in the gaps.

Also if you are still in contact with the models from the Garters & Lace conventions: Judith Diane, Angela, Doris and the rest, please could you let us know.

 

ivyleaf@corsetiere.net

 

October

Apologies for the dearth of updates recently.

Two comparisons of 'through the ages' have caught our attention on social media.

 

There is so much talk these days about AI. I don't understand it but my technical husband says that any computer programme can be termed artificial intelligence by an ambitious marketing department. Only 10% of what is claimed to be AI is actually artificial intelligence.

Will it take over our lives? Well if its attempts to design 1950s foundation garments (below) is anything to go by, it's moving in the right direction but is somewhat wide of the mark.