Canton:
The McKinley Museum’s underwear is showing.
You might think a presidential library and museum would be a pretty staid place, but it’s letting its hair down with Mentioning the Unmentionables, an exhibit that explores the evolution of women’s undergarments from 1810 to the turn of the 21st century.
Appropriately enough, the exhibit is sponsored by Ambiance, a chain of stores that specializes in intimate apparel and, ahem, related products.
It’s an unlikely partnership, Curator Kim Kenney admitted. But this isn’t a typical museum exhibition.
Visitors will see all manner of devices that have concealed, supported and sucked in parts of the female anatomy over the last couple of centuries. They’ll see how women have endured discomfort and even disfigurement in pursuit of an ever-shifting notion of the ideal feminine shape. And they just might find themselves sending up a prayer of thanks for women’s lib and Lycra.
The exhibit came about simply because the museum had undergarments in its collection but never had a reason to put them on display, Kenney said. “I thought, let’s get it all out,” she said.
Literally and figuratively.
Kenney said about half the items in the exhibit belong to the McKinley Museum. The rest were donated or loaned, some from other museums.
“People save bras more than they save underwear. That I learned,” she said.
The exhibit contains some curious devices. There’s a “figure improver” from 1810, a pad stuffed with horsehair that’s sort of the 19th-century equivalent of falsies. There are down-filled sleeve puffs, used in the 1830s and again in the 1890s to make sleeves stand out so the upper arms would look bigger and the waist smaller. There are bustles of all sorts of materials and configurations, including one that looks like a cluster of fabric-covered mattress springs.
You can even see the white linen underwear of first lady Ida Saxton McKinley, including bloomers that were divided and open all the way to the waist to allow for easier access — underpants that museum volunteer Kathy Fleeher jokingly called “the first crotchless panties.” Imagine having to gather up skirt and petticoat layers and manage a pair of bloomers whenever nature called. You get the idea.
(Kenney let us in on a little secret: Women used to use ceramic vessels resembling gravy boats as sort of an early Porta-Potty, so they didn’t have to move aside all those layers to sit down. She suspects some museums have come into possession of those vessels, called bourdaloues, without realizing what they were and have put them on display with the antique china.)
If the divided bloomers seem a little unhygienic, consider that women in earlier times didn’t wear any underwear at all, Fleeher said.
“Basically,” she said, “they thought you should air out.” In fact, women’s underpants came about only when someone identified a need to discourage bugs from flying up women’s skirts, she explained.
Now aren’t you glad you live in the 21st century?
The exhibit shows how underwear evolved along with women’s rights, from the hoops that liberated women from layers of petticoats to the skimpy undergarments worn by free-spirited flappers in the 1920s, the pantyhose of the ’60s and the thongs of today. It traces how corsets evolved into girdles and eventually Spanx, and follows the evolution of the bra, including such oddities as a circa-1915 garment that hooked to the drawers and a 1920s bandeau bra that flattened the chest and gave women the boyish figure that was stylish at the time.
Undergarments are displayed alongside clothing from the time, so viewers can see how one supported the other.
The exhibit also includes night wear and bathing suits, from woolens to bikinis.
Creating the exhibit was harder than Kenney expected. There’s no room for error in dressing a mannequin in skivvies, she said, no unnoticeable way to slip in a little padding here or there to make the garment fit properly.
Of course, 19th-century women probably would have argued that cinching the laces of a corset to make a healthy waist wasplike was no easy task, either.
Undergarments, like women, have come a long way.
Mary Beth Breckenridge can be reached at 330-996-3756 or mbrecken@thebeaconjournal.com. You can also become a fan on Facebook at www.facebook.com/MBBreckABJ, follow her on Twitter @MBBreckABJ and read her blog at www.ohio.com/blogs/mary-beth.