10 Oct Silliest Fashion Accessory of All Time
Thrust: A Spasmodic Pictorial History of The Codpiece in Art, by the English critic Michael Glover, has inspired this edition of the blog. Why devote any attention to it at all, you may well ask. Well, for one thing, it’s pretty funny.
For another, asking why and how did it come to be and why on earth did men elect to wear it? is a good question. It’s always wise to at least try to understand people who are positioning themselves as adversarial.
Grace Vicary, a historian, believes that codpieces were created as a means of containing syphilis which, in the 14th and 15th centuries was sweeping through Europe. She writes, “treating the French pox, as it was known, with a whole galaxy of herbs, minerals, syrups, and decoctions, applied in a variety of messy unguents and poultices,” made for a lot of staining of clothing and, her reasoning goes, it would be smart to isolate the entire bundle in an oversized box. (Leave it to a woman to find some practical reason for the invention of this truly weird ornament.)
For the men of the 15th century, conditions for strutting about displaying a protruding bulge were at their peak: this was an age without pants, you see! Only snug stockings and long gowns hid a man’s private parts and buttocks. But by 1450 doublets had become shockingly short, so more covering was sorely needed. The codpiece in its earlier form was a baggy cloth gusset laced to one’s stockings, but it then grew and grew during the next century, rising into ostentatious display.
In Italy and Spain, padding and stays–like corset stays used to stiffen cloth–came into vogue, and mounting competition led to lavish overly proportioned tubes that stuck out from men’s waist lines–princes and ordinary men both. So the codpiece, originally designed for discretion, instead became a fixed . . . um, contrivance. Dan Piepenbring, writing in The New Yorker, describes it as being compared to a “permanent erection.” It became in fact so large that it could and did serve as a pocket, offering convenient storage for a handkerchief, say, or an apple, in addition to “ballads, bottles, napkins, pistols, hair, and even a looking glass,” as the scholar Will Fisher has written.
Gentlemen rose to the challenge with manly flair, and soon costly codpieces were brocaded, damasked, beaded, bejeweled, and tasselled, until wealthy men were veritable walking holiday displays. On the battlefield a codpiece signaled that you were a brave warrior; in the court, it was a sign of your procreative potency; and everywhere else it projected, literally, swagger.
You have only to look at the portraits of Henry VIII, especially the famous one by Hans Holbein the Younger, to gasp at th extremes to which this could be taken. In fact, a suit of Henry’s armor, which boasts a codpiece weighing more than two and a half pounds, is still on display at the Tower of London; women would stick pins into its red velvet lining to ward off barrenness, since Henry fathered few healthy children.
Will Fisher proposes that the codpiece displays dueling visions of masculinity. Pre-Renaissance, a male’s identity was predicated on ability to have children, ideally lots. (Pity the poor women who had to birth them.) The codpiece advertised that potency, since cod was slang for the scrotum, not the penis. The second vision of masculinity was one that valued sexual conquest more than reproduction, so that codpiece-wearing men were, according to Fisher, essentially displaying their performance anxiety.
Whatever.
By the end of the 16th century, the codpiece’s popularity declined as suddenly as it had ascended and as early as the 1580s, Michel de Montaigne declared the accessory “empty and useless,” and wondered “what was the meaning of that ridiculous part of the breeches worn by our fathers?” Fashion, according to Piepenbring, seemed to have taken a feminine turn, with ruffs building pedestals for the display of necks and upper stocks plumped out from midriffs.
Since then, codpieces have reemerged only in passing. In the 1960s, Black Panther Party leader Eldridge Cleaver seriously used the profits from his prison memoir to design himself a pair of pants with a large “sock-like codpiece” built in. He told the press: “Men have been castrated in clothing, and my pants open up new vistas. I’m against penis binding.”
Well, Eldridge apparently had quite a problem, as demonstrated in his book, Soul On Ice, wherein he actually admits that he practiced rape on black women en route toward graduating to rape white women; this was apparently a political process for him, since black women didn’t matter anyway and white women “belonged” to white men, so it was a way of getting back at “the oppressor.” (Kathleen Cleaver was so right to divorce him and build a life for herself.) But he was not alone. Codpieces have appeared now and then on the runway from such fashion designers as Gucci.
And would you believe men actually did this whole codpiece thing? And men say that women’s fashions are absurd!