Rumors of Bloomers Exhibition with the Center for Colorado Women’s History: Recommended Resources

Reading

Unmentionables traces the history of underwear from its earliest appearance around the frozen loins of a 5,30O-year-old Tyrolean iceman to its up-to-the-minute status as fashion's new outerwear. Using fine art, photography, film stills, cartoons, and advertisements to tell the story visually, Elaine Benson also goes on to describe the social history and psychological underpinnings of a subject that holds an incomparably powerful fascination for all of us. 

Adburgham charts the Victorian origins and subsequent ascent of the 'department store', a mode of shopping that offered the customer an enviable selection of wares, a fixed price, and a recreational browsing experience that began with goods placed temptingly behind plate-glass and continued through shops carefully arranged so that customers might wander. These great emporia changed the labours and livelihoods of craftspeople and small shop-keepers, enhanced the reputation of England's capital and regional cities, and even altered the social climate of England.

Author and former fashion stylist Catherine Bardey takes a tasteful and entertaining look at the history, iconography and appeal of women's underwear, from bloomers and emancipation and the evolution of underwear. From the confining corsets of the Edwardian era to the conical shaped bras of the 1950s to the sheer, supportive shapes of today's lingerie, styles have changed dramatically through the decades, influenced by cultural changes as well as sports and the entertainment industry.

Through the 1950s and the early 1960s, working with that era’s supermodels, fashion photographer Lillian Bassman created the quintessential modern feminine image of women in their lingerie. As Ginia Bellafante put it in the New York Times recently, “In place of heavyset women constraining themselves in what was essentially equipment, Ms. Bassman deployed immeasurably lithe models, conveying a world in which women seemed to linger in the pleasures of their own sensuality.” 

Americans have long cherished romantic images of the frontier and its colorful cast of characters, where the cowboys are always rugged and the ladies always fragile. But in this book, Peter Boag opens an extraordinary window onto the real Old West. Delving into countless primary sources and surveying sexological and literary sources, Boag paints a vivid picture of a West where cross-dressing—for both men and women—was pervasive, and where easterners as well as Mexicans and even Indians could redefine their gender and sexual identities.

Juliette Jennings lives her life like a tightly laced corset—not that she’d ever wear one. As a business owner of a stationery store, structure is her favorite. But when her best friend and her ex fall head over heels for each other, everything unravels and leaves her exposed. Even worse, a scandalous lingerie shop has moved in next door, and its tantalizing window displays will drive away her conservative customers. If only the owner would turn off the charm, Juliette is sure she could stop imagining her in nothing but the shop’s lacy best sellers. 

In Victorian Secrets, Chrisman explains how a garment from the past led to a change in not only the way she viewed herself, but also the ways she understood the major differences between the cultures of twenty-first-century and nineteenth-century America. The desire to delve further into the Victorian lifestyle provided Chrisman with new insight into issues of body image and how women, past and present, have seen and continue to see themselves.

Filled with information and free from cultural hang-ups, this gender-neutral book is directed at anybody that's ever dealt with having a period. Writer and influencer Tara Costello has been writing about menstruation for more than a decade and, here, she pulls together her research and experience into a book that's wide-ranging, inclusive, and fun.

This book outlines the challenges facing those who menstruate worldwide and the solutions championed by a new generation of body positive activists, innovators and public figures.  Including interviews from people on the frontlines—parents, teachers, medical professionals, and social-justice warriors—Period. End of Sentence. illuminates the many ways that menstrual injustice can limit opportunities, erode self-esteem, and even threaten lives. This powerful examination of the far-ranging and quickly evolving movement for menstrual justice introduces today’s leaders and shows us how we can be part of the change.

What can dresses, bedlinens, waistcoats, pantaloons, shoes, and kerchiefs tell us about the legal status of the least powerful members of American society? In the hands of eminent historian Laura F. Edwards, these textiles tell a revealing story of ordinary people and how they made use of their material goods' economic and legal value in the period between the Revolution and the Civil War.

An account of women's underwear from 3000 BC to the present day.

Over the years the bra has been stereotyped as an object of seduction, glamour, and even oppression. In Uplift: The Bra in America, Jane Farrell-Beck and Colleen Gau use this item of clothing to gauge the social history of women in the United States and to understand the business history of fashion. Viewing fashion as a means to entertainment, self-creation, and everyday art, the authors illuminate the effect the brassiere has had on women's lives - their style, health, and economic opportunity.

Burlesque performer, sex educator, and social worker Fancy Feast gives readers a backstage pass to the nightlife and sex industries, examining our culture's hang-ups and obsessions with bodies, desire, and even love.

A law professor and cultural critic offers an eye-opening exploration of the laws of fashion throughout history, from the middle ages to the present day, examining the canons, mores and customs of clothing rules that we often take for granted.

In the last half of the 19th century, the women of America were beginning to develop their own sense of style. Although influenced by European fashions and the social and economic changes of the time, they made clothing choices based upon their personal aspirations and their practical everyday needs. Providing an overview of fashion influences for each decade from the 1860s to the end of the century, Everyday Fashion in Found Photographs presents iconic garments, using sources from the period, to provide commentary and detailed description of the styles of the time.

Rival photographers are forced to collaborate on a body-positive lingerie campaign, but they might have to readjust their focus when sparks fly. Photographer Cassie Harris loves her job-her company, Buxom Boudoir, makes people look beautiful and feel empowered with her modern twist on classic pinup photography. Cassie's best friend, Dana, is about to launch her own lingerie line and wants Cassie to shoot and direct the career-changing national campaign. But company politics and Dana's complicated pregnancy interfere, and Cassie finds herself-a proud plus-size Black woman-not behind the camera but in front of it.

After hearing a harrowing coming-of-age story from her great aunt, Rachel Kauder Nalebuff started gathering stories about menstruation in her family that had never been told. What began as an oral history project quickly snowballed: Rachel heard from family and friends, and then from strangers--writers, experts, community leaders, activists, young people, and other visionaries--about the most intimate physical transformations in their lives. Our Red Book takes us through stories of first periods, last periods, missing periods, and everything about bleeding that people wish they had been told.

Decolonize Drag details the ways that gender is used as a form of colonial governance to eliminate various types of expression, and tracks how contemporary drag, including that on Drag Race, both replicates and disrupts these institutional hierarchies. This book focuses on several gender performers that resist and laugh at colonial projects through their aesthetic practices.

In the modern era, undergarments are out in the open, from the designer corsets Madonna wore on stage to Beyoncé's pregnancy announcement on Instagram. This feminist exploration of women's underwear reveals the intimate role lingerie plays in defining women's bodies, sexuality, gender identity, and body image. It is a story of control and restraint but also female empowerment and self-expression. You will never look at underwear the same way again.

In Sew Lingerie, learn the foundations of DIY lingerie, swimwear, and activewear--from the history of lingerie, types of styles, and different fabrics and elastics, to determining your size and making your own garments. Transform your top drawer with affordable, size-inclusive lingerie, swimwear, and activewear that is made just for you.

The 1970s saw women coming into their own, working hard to create new roles at home and in sports, culture, politics, and business. It was also the start of the 'fitness revolution.' At this unique intersection of feminism and athleticism, Lisa Lindahl's game-changing entrepreneurial journey began. She invented the first sports bra, the 'Jogbra,' in 1977. It was the right product at the right time, throwing Lisa into a high-stakes world of business and power--a world for which she was not fully prepared. This is the improbable story of a young artist with a disability who used her powers of creativity to solve a vexing problem and ended up leveling the playing field for girls and women across the globe--literally, unleashing the girls.

Threadbare draws the connections between the international sex and garment trades and human trafficking in a beautifully illustrated comics series. Anne Elizabeth Moore, in reports illustrated by top-notch comics creators, pulls at the threads of gender, labor, and cultural production to paint a concerning picture of a human rights in a globalized world. Moore's reporting, illustrated by members of the Ladydrawers Comics Collective, takes the reader from the sweatshops of Cambodia to the traditional ateliers of Vienna, from the life of a globetrotting supermodel to the warehouses of large clothing retailers, from the secondhand clothing industry to the politics of the sex trade.

Intimate Apparel is about the empowerment of Esther, a proud and shy seamstress in 1905 New York who creates exquisite lingerie for both Fifth Avenue boudoirs and Tenderloin bordellos. In Fabulation, Nottage re-imagines Esther as Undine, the PR-diva of today, who spirals down from her swanky Manhattan office to her roots back in Brooklyn. Through opposite journeys, Esther and Undine achieve the same satisfying end, one of self-discovery.

In 1900 Sardinia, a young woman's remarkable talent with a needle earns her a position as a seamstress with a wealthy family. Inside this privileged world far different from her own humble beginnings, the skilled sewer quietly takes measurements, sketches designs, mends hems--and in the silence, hears whispered secrets and stories of all those around her. Through the watchful young seamstress's eyes, this small Italian city and its residents emerge in all their vitality, vanity, and fragility--flawed yet congenial people who are not quite what they pretend to be.

Einav Rabinovitch-Fox examines how clothes empowered women, and particularly women barred from positions of influence due to race or class. Moving from 1890s shirtwaists through the miniskirts and unisex styles of the 1970s, Rabinovitch-Fox shows how the rise of mass media culture made fashion a vehicle for women to assert claims over their bodies, femininity, and social roles.

Art Nouveau movement overlapped with late Arts and Crafts in the 1890s and early modernism in the 1910s, combining the exquisite workmanship and natural forms of the former with the innovative materials, forms and practices associated with the latter. Art Nouveau fashion questioned conventional gender norms with daring flamboyance, presenting women in suits, influenced by tailored menswear, for the street and overtly seductive lingerie for the boudoir. The movement's radicalism and openness to diverse design influences directly influenced the counter-culture of the late 1960s, inspiring boutiques in London's fashionable Carnaby Street and San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury.

Studying dress history teaches us much about the past. In this skillfully illustrated, accessible and authoritative book, Jayne Shrimpton demonstrates how fashion and clothes represent the everyday experiences of earlier generations, illuminating the world in which they lived. 

Corsets, and the corseted body, have been fetishized, mythologized, romanticized. This Victorian icon has inspired more passionate debate than any other article of clothing. As a means of body modification, perhaps only foot binding and female genital mutilation have aroused more controversy. Summers provocative book dismantles many of the commonly held misconceptions about the corset. 

On March 25, 1911, as workers were getting ready to leave for the day, a fire broke out in the Triangle shirtwaist factory in New York's Greenwich Village. Within minutes it spread to consume the building's upper three stories. The final toll was 146 people - 123 of them women. It was the worst workplace disaster in New York City History. This harrowing yet compulsively readable book is both a chronicle of the Triangle shirtwaist fire and a vibrant portrait of an entire age.

A study of the evolution of American women's clothing, When the Girls Came Out to Play traces the history of modern sportswear as a universal style that broke down traditional gender roles. Patricia Warner shows how this profound cultural shift, which did not reach fruition until World War II, originated during the previous century with the gradual expansion of socially acceptable physical activity for women. Behind this development was a growing interest in sports and exercise that was further nurtured by the establishment of schools of higher education for women.

In this classic book, Norah Waugh explores the changing shapes of women's dress from the 1500s to the 1920s. Simple laced bodices became corsets of cane, whalebone, and steel, while padding at shoulders and hips gave way to the structures of farthingales, hoops, and bustles.

In Periods Gone Public, Jennifer Weiss-Wolf--the woman Bustle dubbed one of the nation's "badass menstrual activists"--explores why periods have become a prominent political cause. From eliminating the tampon tax, to enacting new laws ensuring access to affordable, safe products, menstruation is no longer something to whisper about. Weiss-Wolf shares her firsthand account in the fight for "period equity" and introduces readers to the leaders, pioneers, and everyday people who are making change happen.

We Too: Essays on Sex Work and Survival is a collection of narrative essays by sex workers responding to the resurgence of the #MeToo movement in 2017. Sex workers from across the industry write across topics such as homelessness, motherhood, queerness, and toxic masculinity-complicating narratives of sexual harassment and violence, and expanding conversations often limited to normative workplaces.

Watching

After receiving notification via group text message that they are being laid off, the hardworking female employees of the Veronica garment factory decide to "borrow" some of the factory's equipment to produce their own line of lingerie. Lead by factory forewoman Armida, the group is determined to overcome the odds and make their business a success, despite their lack of resources.
Available to stream on Kanopy

This documentary features raw, powerful interviews with 18 diverse cisgender and transgender women about their sexual & reproductive health histories. Women from a variety of racial and ethnic, age, sexual orientation, and class backgrounds candidly recount their histories with sexual education, early sexual experiences, abortion, birth control, masturbation, relationships, gender transition, menstruation, STIs, gynecological exams, sexual assault, pregnancy, pleasure, and much more.
Available to stream on Kanopy

Fashion designer Amy Powney of cult label Mother of Pearl is a rising star in the London fashion scene. Raised off-the-grid in rural England by activist parents, Amy has always felt uneasy about the devastating environmental impact of her industry. When she wins the coveted Vogue award for the Best Young Designer of the Year, which comes with a big cash prize, Amy decides to use the money to create a sustainable collection from field to finished garment, and transform her entire business. Over the following three years, her own personal revolution becomes the precursor of a much bigger, societal change.
Available to stream on Kanopy

This episode of The Green Interview features Tzeporah Berman, an eco-activist, environmental iconoclast, and author who has been designing and winning environmental campaigns in Canada for two decades. Her latest book, This Crazy Time: Living Our Environmental Challenge, documents some of her most notable experiences on the front lines of Canada’s environmental organizations and some of their most successful environmental campaigns, including the 5-month long protests of old-growth logging at Clayoquot Sound, the protection of the Great Bear Rain Forest, and more recently the clever fake ad campaign that forced a lingerie-giant to create an environmental procurement policy for the pulp it uses in its catalogues. 
Available to stream on Kanopy

Take your students behind the scenes in the garment industry. Join a film crew to visit Henry-Lee Apparel in Chicago, a family business that makes over five hundred styles a year for six brand lines. Follow each step of garment production from raw fabric to its delivery to the retail outlet. Learn the role of the designer, pattern maker, marker, spreader, and cutter. See how progressive bundling and whole garment manufacturing differ.
Available to stream on Kanopy

No Sweat is a fast-paced, behind-the scenes documentary that follows SweatX and American Apparel, two hip T-shirt factories that operate in downtown Los Angeles, just blocks from each other, comparing their divergent business practices, interviewing workers, following a union drive, and zeroing in on the hopes and dreams of the garment workers themselves.
Available to stream on Kanopy

Employees of the Sleeptite Pajama Factory are looking for a whopping seven-and-a-half cent an hour pay raise and they won't take no for an answer. Babe Williams (Doris Day) is their feisty employee representative, but she may have found her match in shop superintendent Sid Sorokin (John Raitt). When the two get together they wind up discussing a whole lot more than job actions.

With humor and refreshing candor, the documentary provides a fascinating, often ironic, take on the absurd and frequently dangerous cultural stigmas and superstitions surrounding women's menstruation. As educational as it is liberating, the film functions as both a myth-busting overview of the realities of menstruation, and a piercing cultural analysis of the ways in which struggles over meaning and power have played out through history on the terrain of women's bodies.
Available to stream on Kanopy

It started off as a web-series, charting the experiences of three young fashion bloggers, who spent a month living the life of Cambodian garment workers in Phnom Penh.  Frida, Anniken and Ludwig live, breath and dream fashion. They spend hundreds of euros every month on clothes and make a living promoting the latest catwalk trends. Except for speculation that factory workers must be ‘used to’ their hard lives, they have never given much thought to the people who make their clothes. Now, they’re trading their comfortable lives for those of Cambodian garment workers. As well as working in the factories, they have to survive on $3 a day. 
Available to stream on Kanopy

It was the deadliest workplace accident in New York City’s history. A dropped match on the 8th floor of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory sparked a fire that killed over a hundred innocent people trapped inside. The private industry of the American factory would never be the same.
Available to stream on Kanopy

For sale on the market of the Syrian capital Damascus: lingerie of transparent plastic, adorned with zippers, feathers, flashlights and even some tunes on microchips. The contrast with the customers' black veils could not be greater. The Canadian documentary filmmaker Noura Kevorkian, who emigrated from Lebanon as a teenager, looked for women who had the courage to lift their veils. Although it is strictly prohibited to film women in Syria, Kevorkian talks with a few brave ones about their concealed sexuality.
Available to stream on Kanopy