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  • Stays and Body Image in London: The Staymaking Trade, 1680-1810 by Lynn Sorge-English
  • Christelle Rabier (bio)
Stays and Body Image in London: The Staymaking Trade, 1680-1810. By Lynn Sorge-English. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011. Pp. xi+285. $99.

"We hear the ladies, who for some time past have assumed the slovenly custom of appearing at ***** without stays have received a . . . [reproof] that their compliance with the old method of dress be as full as agreeable," reads a 1761 advertisement, hinting that the stay had become a dress code of the Enlightenment, from upper to lower classes. Lynn Sorge-English presents in Stays and Body Image a fascinating history of the stay, which she has explored in admirable depth. The title belies what proves to be a rich account—one could say "total history"—of a complex garment, including its technology, manufacturing, consumption, use, and taste change over a long eighteenth century. Her work started as a material investigation of stays and their forms and manufacturing, from 1680 when they separated from the outer bodice till the beginning of the nineteenth century. Using a wide array of primary sources emanating from the staymakers themselves and their clients, along with probate inventories, legal records, trade cards, and iconographic documents, she expands her analysis to uncover a rich social, cultural, and economic history of a thriving London trade.

Chapter 1 analyzes the specialization of the staymaking trade. Sorge-English presents the details of garments kept in fifteen collections in the United Kingdom and the United States. She is thus able to give a sense of the complex technology at stake, which combined a large number of raw materials ranging from paper or cotton to delicate silk and woods. Whalebones—split, warmed, and formed onto the body and stitched neatly in cases—gave form and value to the garment, in terms of price, quality, and manufacturing time. Mending and altering were essential moments in the manufacturing process, as close examination of remaining stays shows. Shapes changed over the century, with the appearance of gussets for each breast. Chapter 3 explores the life cycle of stay-wearing, for which she has uncovered new evidence. She argues, rightly, that Londoners, both male and female, wore stays throughout their lives, including childhood and adolescence, [End Page 398] during which stays helped with body correction. In chapter 5, Sorge-English matches her findings with an analysis of textual and visual evidence—regrettably not reproduced in a book discussing "body image"— regarding stays' erotic dimensions, as well as their role as body garments. In Sorge-English's story, the manufacture of stays may be better described as a process in which the life of the garment went through different phases of mending, reshaping, adapting, and fitting, also in homes.

Sorge-English studies stay-trade provision, supply, and distribution in chapters 2 and 4, thanks to a most convincing use of probate inventories, policies of the Sun Fire Offices, trade registers, legal evidence from the Old Bailey, and the 1744 journal of staymaker Robert Viney. Accordingly, she provides a vivid description of working life in staymaking. In keeping with what has been shown for Paris tailoring trades, she argues that places of work varied, from masters' shops to the lodgings of journeymen, who might use their masters' tools for finishing work. Sorge-English pays close attention to the means by which clients and staymakers constructed segmented and complementary markets. Chapter 4 argues against a too-clear-cut distinction between manufacturing and retailing, with the buying of a stay going hand in hand with fitting and repair. Similarly, bespoke manufacturing diversified with an increase in ready-made wear. Accordingly, shops, which Sorge-English maps for London, may not have been so central in the overall distribution network, which included the channels of theft, secondhand buying, charities' procurements, or supply to servants within households.

With its index, bibliography, and list of London staymakers, the volume is a useful contribution to the social, economic, cultural, and technological history of the Enlightenment. This reader, who regrets some overlapping in the chapters' structures and the author's tendency to extensively quote and paraphrase rather than tighten her historical argument, is...

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