Darlene Clover, founder of the initiative for a Women’s Museum in Victoria, Canada visited two exhibitions in Toronto. One was of Christian Dior at the Royal Ontario Museum and the other, “Victims of Fashion” at the Bata Shoe Museum. She created these ‘found poems’ from wording and phrases from the curatorial statements, explanatory panels and labels, which she will read at her talk feminist research and pedagogy at the University of Huddersfield:
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Ode to the Couturier The bible has not taught us so much As this master of shape This great conductor of form Who astonished the public By orchestrating away wartime masculine style To make women feel like women again Clothed in the armour Of a revival of 19th century corsetry That obscured the natural to accentuate the waist And enshrine femininity As the ‘new look’ of peace
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Ode to the victims Their worries proved to be well-founded In the decades long reign Of notorious female fashion dictates Cloth dipped in toxic pigments Testing positive for arsenic And when brushed against a flame Set instantly alight the women Imprisoned in the steel corseted cage Crafted to make a criminally small waist And mocked mercilessly by caricaturists For their female excess and frivolity |