Fashion Wire Daily NY - Breasts -- the subject of regular arousal to many men, and alternating waves of angst and pride for many women -- are the topic of an arresting new book that appeared in bookstores last month. Entitled, "The Breast Book, An Intimate and Curious History," the 500-page tome by Barnard College English professor Maura Spiegel and Paris/New York journalist and Vogue contributor Lithe Sebesta, is a beautifully laid-out look at mammary glands, an insightful and titillating vision of the boob through history.
The authors begin with the Naked Ape and a discussion on how humans became the only mammals with permanently swollen breasts. That's a tricky question, they argue, making the logical point that, as there's no such thing as breast fossils, it's hard to pinpoint the evolutionary process.
Fashionable folk, however, will be sure to appreciate the book's view of the rapport between fashion and breasts. Spiegel and Sebesta quote art historian Anne Hollander, who argues that clothing dictates a time period's preference for breast shape and size, and not the other way around. "When long-waisted dresses were in fashion, so was the long-waisted nude; when styles emphasized the high-seated far-apart bosom... painted nudes followed suit." One hears the haute couturiers of Paris murmuring agreement.
Sadly for them and many others, our contemporary culture has, frequently, been reductionist when it comes to the breast. "Breasts, bazoombas, tits, ta-tas, knockers... breasts are simply everywhere," write Spiegel and Sebesta, but unfortunately in contemporary culture, "breasts' popularity is flattened into a one-syllable word: sex, as in SEXXX." Too true, type "breasts" into Google's search engine and nearly all the responses are porn sites.
Variety, they argue, is the source of much of our fascination with breasts. An opening chapter is a neat catalogue of differing historical views, and an explanation of how breasts, like noses, reveal everything from character type to changing national views of the bosom. The book's two-page spread on how France's national symbol since the Revolution, La Marianne, is particularly clever. The Marianne changes every decade - currently it's super model Laetitia Casta, and the changing shape of her breasts evokes the change in France's vision of itself, from the 1940s, "pointy breasts are torpedoes in France's arsenal," to the '60s, where Brigitte Bardot's "presilicone beauties are the ripe assets of a good-time girl."
"The Breast" is also a great photographic record of its subject, packaged in a novel romance-novel shape. Images range from faintly shocking medieval nipple shields in silver or lead in The Breast's "oral history" of breast feeding and Leonardo da Vinci's illustration of Christ furtively grabbing a suck of the Madonna's nipple, to Giuseppe di Somma's surrealist vision of nipples as brass faucets, to a Restoration fop proffering a "breast-pad harness" to a naughty lady.
Finally, it's instructive, and timely, given the recent Victoria Secret's New York catwalk show, to read a chapter on shaping the silhouette. This covers everything from the a 15th century invention known as the "busk" -- a strip of horn, metal or whalebone inserted down the front from the bust to the hips to elongate the form that was engraved with amorous verses -- all the way to today's Bioform Bra. Though maybe the most insight on this subject is gleaned from a pull quote from Zsa Zsa Gabor, "The only place men want depth in a woman is her décolletage." Say it ain't so.
