Corsets and codpieces A history of outrageous fashion, from Roman times to the modern era

despite its seriously restrictive title, "Corsets and Codpieces" is an extremely expansive, often jolly book. Karen Bowman is the writer's equivalent of a magpie, her beady eye alert for the oddest of details and the weirdest of facts in her brisk romp through a millennium of fashion's victims. I won't soon forget her description of the mortified lady who attended a Dickens reading in an inflatable rubber bustle and found that it farted when sat upon - or of the hungry horse who dined off the stuffing in a fashionable racegoer's bran-enhanced behind. "Essex Boys," Bowman's previous book, scampered through the histories of a colorful group of that British county's celebrities. Here her focus is less on individuals and more on the follies they expensively embraced. For at least a thousand years, the unholy alliance of commerce and fashion has zealously exploited the thrill of religious transgression. The purpose of a medieval wimple was virtuous: Wearing an inverted ice cream cone on your head screened from view the ears into which, on one occasion, divine conception had been breathed. Buttons were just asking for trouble when the eyelet might expose a glimpse of sinful flesh beneath, while any evidence of a woman's waistline, however snugly clad, was downright wicked. "Hell's Windows" was the church's incendiary name for the fashionable opensided tunics through which Chaucer's Troilus might first have glimpsed his seductive Criseyde's pliant form. Move on a bit in time and fashion gets flouncy. At court, a Tudor peacock thought nothing of spending 100 pounds on his thigh-clinging tights, while donning a codpiece capacious enough to encase the family jewels (hence the still-current slang for the male private parts). On the battlefield, the habit of patching up ripped garments with scraps of looted silk may have been the inspiration for stay-athome courtiers to prance fraudulently about in their own tailor-slashed doublets. Fabric dyes told their own narrative of a warlike age, with names like "Dead Spaniard," "Dying Monkey" and "Sad New Color," while Frenchmen mocked the ruff-throttled ladies of Elizabeth I's court for encasing their slender necks in the frilled vice of "the English Monster." Discomfort is a constant in Bowman's history of high fashion. Rigging a ship took less time than a Georgian wigmaker needed to tweak and talc a lady's towering headpiece with two pounds of white powder. Maintaining this unwieldy trumpery safely aloft while navigating an eight-foot-wide skirt into a carriage made a challenge of every social excursion. Nor was every fashion-conscious gentleman blessed with the legs for wearing hose of tight, white silk. Bowman produces the salutary tale of a lover whose lust was cruelly sapped by the terror that his lady might discover the false calves he had furtively slipped beneath their pillows. Certain items of clothing have always been prime material for comedy, and Bowman doesn't restrain herself with her stories of spring-loaded bustles, musical bustles and even lidded bustles (in which to pack, believe it or not, one's weekend change of underwear). The jokes thin out (sorry) when she turns to corsets: "tight-lace liver" became in Victorian times a recognized cause of early death. Meanwhile, the voluminous crinolines that served as perfect hiding places for cigars and gin when dodging customs also proved a serious hazard to health and modesty. One young factory worker died when her swaying skirts became trapped in the machinery, and Florence Nightingale had to remind her crinolined nurses of the view from behind when they bent over. A harrowing statistic: In London, 2,500 wearers of flammable crinolines met fiery deaths in the single year of 1864. Sadly, no drooping bloomers or poke bonnets are on offer in Bowman's largely lighthearted history of extreme fashions. Let's hope she's just keeping them back for her next eruditely playful offering. ? MIRANDA SEYMOUR'S most recent book is "Noble Endeavors: The Life of Two Countries, England and Germany, in Many Stories"