Word: corset
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...civic prop, a pillar that holds society upright. (A run-on sentence, its phrases piling up without division, is as unsightly as a sink piled high with dirty dishes.) Small wonder, then, that punctuation was one of the first proprieties of the Victorian age, the age of the corset, that the modernists threw off: the sexual revolution might be said to have begun when Joyce's Molly Bloom spilled out all her private thoughts in 36 pages of unbridled, almost unperioded and officially censored prose; and another rebellion was surely marked when E.E. Cummings first felt free to commit...
...jukebox Juliet in some 1980s T shirt ripper. The reverse is just as emphatically true for most of the young American actresses. Try seeing Laura Dern's superior performance as a hormone-fogged California adolescent in Smooth Talk, for instance, and then envision her in a Victorian corset and long skirt. Fuses blow; imagination does not stretch that far. Dern, for starters, has too much Pacific Ocean salt in her blond hair, and her lanky good looks are too much a matter of knees and shoulders and elbows. She looks as if she should be playing power forward...
...cocktail waitress at Caesars Palace, a hotel and casino organized around a spurious Greco-Roman theme. Locally, the Goddesses are dubbed coneheads, after the shape of the false hairpiece that is part of the costume. Unchanged since the hotel opened in 1966, the uniform, with its uncomfortable corset top and cutie-pie short pleated skirt, is as archaic as the clothes in a Currier & Ives print. The Goddesses, carrying a tray of drinks in one hand, give a thin gloss of glamour to a job that is a grueling eight-hour hike in high heels. But, says Goddess Bonnie Arrage...
Dior minimized the waist not only by means of clever cutting and a mini-corset or guepiere; be padded out the front hip bones and used every known trick of the art of couture in elaborately constructing his models. To add the ultra-feminine look of these costumes, Dior added small flowered hats with veils, high-heeled shoes, colored gloves to match a buttonhole or handkerchief, long slim umbrellas to tone with shoes and bag, and two or four strings of pearls...
With thirteen other novels to her name, Oates has perfected a lush style whose recurring symbols anything from a bottle of orange-flavored medicine to a full figure corset almost escape our conscious notice. A Bloodsmoor Romance, although packed with laughs and adventure cannot be read quickly and its prodigious length barely serves to tie up all the loose ends. Not many apparently light contemporary novels leave the reader feeling so punch drunk...