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Medieval "Lingerie" From 15th Century Castle Could Rewrite Fashion History
fangmcgee writes "Archaeologists have unearthed several 500-year-old bras that some experts say could rewrite fashion history. While they'll hardly send pulses racing by today's standards, the lace-and-linen underpinnings predate the invention of the modern brassiere by hundreds of years. Found hidden under the floorboards of Lengberg Castle in Austria's East Tyrol, along with some 2,700 textile fragments and one completely preserved pair of (presumably male) linen underpants, the four intact bras and two fragmented specimens are thought to date to the 15th century, a hypothesis scientists later confirmed through carbon-dating."
I know a chick named Donna Matrix who goes for the whole Medieval Lingerie thing.
Tends more toward leather and chainmail than lace. Probably due to the crude manufacturing technology of the times.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
What looks at first glance like a descending backstrap is, in fact, the edge of a missing descending section - look at the lace holes, and the lay of the fabric.
The entire lower front of what I assume to be some kind of "control garment" (like those combined bra/corset things you sometimes see in catalogues) is missing. Bodice, or corset, with built-in cups, yes. Brassiere, in the modern sense, no.
I'm betting on costumes for a game of "The Naughty Pirate rips the Farmer's Daughter's Bodice".
...that even in the 15th century, you still had to ensure you protected your washing line from underwear fetishists.....
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Why do women wear bras anyways? They don't need them. :P
I've always assumed it was to prevent them from slapping against their foreheads cartoonishly when running.
The Wolfpack Project: BitCoin + Crowdfunding = Political Accountability
Thou are speaketh in a comical form and manor. I say art thoueth a baffoon or comical jester?
You simply must continue on. Doesth thou produce plays? Pray tell where doest one sign up to get tickets? I wish to submit myself to thy whimsicle banter!
Art thou a foreigner still attempting to apprehend the vagaries of the English tongue?
Thy grammar is weak; though switchest betwixt second person singular and plural without reason, and though fabricatest idiomatic chimerae such as "thoueth" without regard for linguistic merit. Thy conjugation is often off: thou dost use the third person indicative form "speaketh" when thou speakest directly to a second person. Thine usage of helping verbs is often spurious, and thine orthological butcherings of "dost" and "doth" are most droll.
rage, rage against the dying of the light
I suspect you won't actually care for an answer, but it's for both practical and aesthetic reasons.
My breasts would not be considered "big" by most people's standards, but they still move enough to make running without a bra very uncomfortable. Being braless is a hindrance to free, impulsive movement for me.
If that weren't reason enough, my natural breast shape is not considered fashionable in this decade (or since sometimes in the 50s, I reckon). Also, since almost no one has their daily streetclothes personally tailored to them these days, a bra is often necessary to make one's silhouette fit the cut of modern off-the-rack clothes.
Many cultures do put the most absurd expectations on women. The desire of (mostly old men and women) to control female behaviour is quite uniform and quite depressing.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
But in honesty - so was Shakespeare's and indeed all medieval and renaissance playwrights. The anachronisms have their origins in the circle-plays which were one of the few forms of theater that were allowed in the middle-ages under catholic rule. Peasants used to do Easter Passions with each craft guild depicting one part of the story - and they used to set the story in their own familiar circumstances. The Shepherd's circle for example is in medieval English and describes things from a contemporary rather than ancient shepherd's point of view.
These anachronisms were probably unintentional at the start but became traditional over the years.
By Renaissance times the tradition was well established and all playwrights gleefully used anachronisms all the time. Sometimes with clever plot points to sneak them in. Marlowe's Doctor Faustus uses magic to introduce time-travel in a plot which left a clear imprint on present-day Doctor Who - and so hides it's massive anachronisms (a medieval character meeting Helen of Troy) behind a clever plot - but even that wasn't always done, when the anachronisms were more subtle they were usually just left unexplained. So for example, in Macbeth, Duncan's two sons spend time at the court of Edward the Great, even though Macbeth is set almost two centuries before Edward the Great was even BORN (but Edward was a direct ancestor to Queen Elizabeth - still reigning monarch when Macbeth was written), the passage is a clear case of puckering up to the royal rectum rather than attempting to be historically accurate or believable.
So one could argue that any attempt to write in Shakespearean-inspired middle-English would be MORE authentic if it's filled with anachronisms since Shakespeare himself loved anachronisms.
Tom Stoppard (perhaps the greatest Shakespeare-expert in contemporary theater, also the script-writer for Shakespeare in Love) played on this beautifully when he wrote "Rozencrantz and Guildenstern are dead" - a play which posits what would happen if the two messengers that leave the court of Hamlet to visit England would arrive in the England of King Lear.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
>Beware of the Grammar Huguenots.
That post had such potential... if only you knew history. The Huguenots fled persecution (In fact I'm of Huguenot Descent - that's my own family history you're talking about) - you basically said the equivalent of "Beware the Grammar Jews" when you meant to say Nazis.
Since "Grammar Catholics" has no time-reference, I suppose a good version could be "Beware the Henry VIII Grammar Anglicans" instead ?
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Maybe they found one of the first versions of a bra with a modern design, but already some Roman mosaics showed women wearing two-piece clothing, which isn't so different from a modern day bikini.
karma police: arrest this man, he talks in maths; he buzzes like a fridge, he's like a detuned radio. [radiohead]