So true

[frualeydis]

This quote from Men and Women.Dressing the part (Hong Kong 1989)by Claudia Brush Kidwell and Valerie Steele beautifully sums up something I've been trying to say in my chapter on clothes and gender, but never was able to state so clearly. Although they exemplify with the 1840s and later the 1940s it is equally true for the medieval period. "It is not always obvious, when looking at the past, to determine which features of masculine and feminine fashions are potent signs of gender and which are simply fashionable design elements (and these may not always be mutually exclusive). Conditioned as we are today to think of rounded women and rectangular men, we are likely to identify small waists and rounded hips as masculine. Yet in the 1840s, when middle-class men and women wore very different clothing and did very different things, an hourglass figure simply denoted a fashionable person.”