The Essay - Body Armour
"My lady's corselet" was developed by a pioneer of free verse on the frontlines of feminism, the poet Mina Loy. Celebrated in the 1910s as the quintessential New Woman, her love of freedom was shadowed by a darker quest to perfect the female body, as her unusual designs for a figure-correcting corset show. Sophie Oliver asks how she fits into a history of body-correcting garments and cosmetic surgery, feminism and fashion. Working on both sides of the Atlantic writing poetry and designing bonkers body-altering garments: like a bracelet for office workers with a built-in ink blotter, or her ‘corselet’ to correct curvature of the spine in women - in the end Mina Loy couldn’t stop time, and her late-life poetry is full of old clothes and outcast people from the Bowery, as she reckons with – and celebrates – the fact that she has become unfashionable.
Producer: Torquil MacLeod
Image: Mina Loy, Designs for a ‘corselet’, or ‘armour for the body’, c.1941. Mina Loy papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Courtesy of Roger L. Conover, Mina Loy's editor and executor.
Sophie Oliver teaches English Literature at the University of Liverpool and is a New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council which turns academic research into radio programmes. You can find a collection of essays, discussions and features with New Generation Thinkers on the Free Thinking programme website under the playlist Ten Years of New Generation Thinkers https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p08zhs35
Published on Monday, 7th March 2022.
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