Vitamins and Exercise to Replace Girdles by 2007 (1957)
Tuesday, April 27, 2010 at 7:49PM ;)
The June 26, 1957 Fairbanks Daily News-Miner ran an article titled, "Vitamins and Exercise Will Replace Girdles in 50 Years, Says Designer." An excerpt appears below, while the article in its entirety can be read at right.
The corset people are in a dither because a fashion designer says the woman of the future won't need a girdle.
Designer Adele Simpson predicted recently that 50 years hence, women will have such good figures they won't need to wear "unmentionables."
She said the improvement will come from vitamins and exercise.
Betty Vincent, educational director and fashion consultant for the Formfit Company, was quick to take issue.
Fifty years from now, she said, women still will come in assorted shapes and sizes.
Miss Vincent was willing to bet her girdle that even 500 years from now the female figure will vary little from today's models, "vitamins and exercise not withstanding."
"I think Mrs. Simpson is being unduly optimistic," she said. "Vitamins may be important to health, but they'll do little to life the bosom or control the average derriere."
Female shapes, she said, have changed but little over the past several thousand years, and to expect a radical improvement in the next half century is "wishful thinking."
Previously on Paleo-Future:
- Futuristic Hairdo Hits Women Like New Atom Bomb (1948)
- Taller Women by Year 2000 (1949)
- Fashion Wired For Sound in Year 2000 (1957)
Reader Comments (7)
Well, they were both wrong. Shapes have changed, but they've exploded, not remained the same or gotten better.
Off all the predictions on here, this one is by far the most off the mark! LOL
I guess that's the great thing about writing an article that makes predictions so far in the future. If you're wrong, it won't hurt your career and no one will be mad. I feel badly for anyone who took this advice seriously when it was published.
Nowhere to they consider the possibility that changing fashion would make all that stuff obsolete.
The woman's comments about women's various shapes not changing much were on the mark.
What's really changed is the shapes women/society/fashion want women's bodies to be molded into. In the 20s it was the curve-less thin flapper, in the 40s it returned to the trim-waisted hourglass, and only since the late 60s have we prefered a "natural" shape, and this view has since changed in the 80s and 90s with the added idea that our "natural" shape should be tempered primarily by exercise.
I'd like to point out that there are still plenty of girdles on the market, primarily marketed to middle-aged women, but they are now called "tummy tuckers."
Well the optimism was there. And some people have got the hang of this exercising and vitamin thing, not enough yet though
I agree with the prediction as long as people are well informed about what they buy. There is a lot of crap out there!