Historical reality of French Maid & Slavegirl Costumes

Factual Questions
1

I was watching a sterling mystery movie the other day called “The Naked Detective,” and in it there’s a maid wearing the stereotypical French maid outfit. You know what I’m talking about – short black dress that ends not far south of the waist, lots of frilly petticoats (or whatever you call them things) lots of cleavage, little black choker, black hose, little white hat, black high heels.

That got me to thinking (no, really!) – was there ever any historical reality to this outfit? That is, was there ever a job that involved cleaning and not sex in which young women were thus attired? Now, I’m not talking about some Victorian variant where the hemline runs to the floor and there’s nothing but cloth from the neck down. I’m sure that existed. I’m talking about something pretty close to what I just described. Cynical guy that I am, I can’t see anybody’s wife letting the help run around dressed like that. My suspicion is that the French maid outfit is a dramatic takeoff on an actual costume which was less revealing.

On to slavegirls (yay!). It has always been my contention that in any B-movie in which slavegirls are featured, the slavegirls’ costume should be pretty durned scanty, nothing or next to it. After all, it adds a lot of, um, drama to have nekkid women running around in the background of a movie. But slavegirls are generally dressed like the other characters in movies. Frex, in Roger Corman’s Arena, a B-grade epic “borrowing” from “Gladiator” about fighting slavegirls, the gals wear loose-fitting dresses that look, well, sedate when they’re not fighting.

I remember that there’s a verse in the Bible somewhere that calls on masters to dress their slaves like unto themselves, which kinda implies that a lot of masters didn’t do so. And I remember that in Roman times somebody once proposed making slaves wear special garments that would identify them as slaves, but the idea was nixed on the grounds that if slaves knew how numerous they were in relation to citizens, the citizens might find themselves suddenly dead.

I’m betting slaves ran around close to nekkid in Egypt but then, so did citizens. And that’s about it for my knowledge. Anybody got any historical input here? Who knows, maybe a REALLY authoritative post would convince Hollywood directors to do things right.:dubious:

I await the word of Dopers in the know.

2

Female gladiators often fought topless. Unfortunately they left that part out of the movie.

3

You see, Verhoeven would have left that in.

4

I’d google “French Maids” but I’m in work and skimming through thousands of porn websites (no matter how academically) is forned upon where I work.

As for the slaves, in ancioent Rome I’m pretty sure that it wouldn’t have mattered how the slaves were dressed. The Romans (and Greeks) view their slaves as mere “farm tools with voices”. If they wanted to rape them - fire away. Under the Empire it became illegal to kill your slaves without good reason, but I wouldn’t want to be relying on that law to save me. So I think that dress code wasn’t an issue.

Although there were some well educated slaves, the vast majority were manual labourers, and would have been in chains anyway - so I think they would have recognized each other anyway.

There’s waaaay more, a good book that I have (but not on me now) is called “Greek and Roman Slavery” by Thomas E. Wiedemann.

5

Jesus - how Freudian do you want ???

6

Yeah, and the odd thing about that was, it was supposed to be a SEXPLOITATION film!!! Though I’ll tell you, I reviewed sexploitation films for awhile, and to tell the truth, they’re generally so incompetently done that this doesn’t really surprise me. Neglecting to get your actresses nekkid does represent a NEW kind of incompetence, but it’s in keeping with the general level of what’s out there.

7

One of the reasons I asked here is that I figured that doing any kind of web search for “French maid” would pull up so many porn sites that it would take hours to find any useful information, if it was available at all. It’s one of those topics that’s rather difficult to research directly on the Web, much like enormous breasts.

As for the slaves, in ancioent Rome I’m pretty sure that it wouldn’t have mattered how the slaves were dressed.

I guess what you are saying is that there was no specific dress code. I was wondering though if there were provisions about thinngs like public nudity, and whether or not that might apply to slaves. Not that this really matters … historical accuracy isn’t that important to Hollywood … just curious.

Although there were some well educated slaves, the vast majority were manual labourers, and would have been in chains anyway - so I think they would have recognized each other anyway.

Why would they have been in chains? Farm labor slaves in the American South didn’t work the fields in chains, what kept them there was the certain knowledge they’d be hunted down. I imagine you get more productivity out of slaves who aren’t in chains.

8

When it came to paranoia, the Romans knew what was what. They were convinced that (much as you state) they would all be horribly mutilated and killed in a massive rebellion if the slaves weren’t opressed to the crushing-point. If the slaves weren’t being productive enough in chains you just beat them all, until one of them died from the beating and then the others kinda figured they’d better work their fingers to the bone… shitty life.

Doubtless, the slaves were under no illusions about their prospects if they escaped and were recaptured, but by and large, the Romans weren’t into taking risks with these “barbarian animals”.

9

LOL

Imagine explaining that to the IT manager.

Me:“It’s for a project”
IT:“Yeah, right. Here’s your pink-slip.”

10

From what I’ve seen of Roman art, the run-of-the-mill female slave was essentially dressed in a sack. They were less-than-human, for the most part, and thus were best dressed anonymously and functionally. Dancing girls or sex toy slaves might be naked or dressed very provocatively (with easy access), but that was their function.

11

I can’t speak for the slave girls, but the French maid outfits are total burlesque fantasy. I have “How to Handle the Servants” books from the late 19th century, and you would not believe how prim and unsexy the outfits were! The main difference was in color (black, blue or white) and accoutrements (caps, aprons) for different jobs (lady’s maid, parlormaid, kitchen maid, etc.).

That having been said, the Sexy Servant Girl was an old, old music-hall staple, and actresses would wear the sexy versions while singing songs like “How Bridget Served the Salad Undressed.”

12

Yeah, the funny thing is in Hollywood slavegirls seem to wear pretty nice robes, no matter what. I was watching a pretty good movie set in ancient Rome called “Age of Treason” and you really couldn’t tell the slavegirls from the ladies without a scorecard. And the Corman stinker, same thing. I imagine you are right that the slavegirls were dressed according to function, with most in rags.

I’m OK with Hollywood taking liberties with such things, since the real goal fo costuming is to advance the drama – a sex toy slavegirl should look really sexy, a common slavegirl should look really run down compared to the high ladies. Doesn’t often happen that way.

13

Thanks, that was just the sort of thing I was looking for. How did you know the outfits are fantasy? As I said in my OP, that’s what I suspect, but there’s one thing that’s made me think they might have SOME kinda basis in reality, and that’s how consistent they are. The French maid outfit is always portrayed in pretty much te same way, whether in New Yorker cartoons from the 20s or Dannon commercials from the 90s. It it was cut from whole cloth, you’d think there might be some variation. It does seem possible that some particular show or performer sort of established it as an icon onstage and everything is based on that show rather than reality.

14

I’d say the current-day “French Maid Outfit” is based almost 100% on late 19th-century burlesque and music-hall costumes. Certainly actual French maids (up till WWII) wore ankle-length dresses, buttoned-up collars, long sleeves and little caps. Think “Miss Gulch” from* The Wizard of Oz*.

15

This thread is reminiscent of this classic Cecil column, especially when Cec says:

“I’d guess more [chastity] belts have been manufactured since 1950 than previously existed in the history of the world”

We always mangle history to meet our current needs, and find titilation in something that was mundane at the time it was created or first used. The contrast now, though, is that film and digital storage has made it possible for future generations to really see what things looked like from, say, 1920 onward. If big hairstyles come back in fashion, for example, anyone will be order to Tivo-order an episode of Dynasty and see them in their (heh-heh) “natural” state. In fact, you could argue that this era is actually the end of history (though not as Francis Fukuyama predicted) in the sense that “history” won’t be what experts can piece together from fragmentary scraps of parchment and pottery. If some future historian wants to write a paper on the 1980s, he’ll have hundreds of thousands of hours of video recordings at his disposal, and if he draws any really loopy conclusions, someone will be able to instantly prove him wrong by finding counter-evidence.

Of course, this also means that the “French Maid” uniform is pretty much locked in its current form.

I’m just so upset about that, let me tell you. Truly heartbroken.

16

Mmm… pink slips…

–Patch

17

An Underground Education by Richard Zacks shows a big contrast between the clothes actually worn in Ottoman harems and the “I Dream if Jeannie” costumes of western imagination. Apparently, real-life slave girls didn’t dress all that provocatively.

In fact, virtually all images of cleavage-y belly dancing slave girls originated in England and France. People actually living in the Near East in the 19th Century weren’t having anywhere near as much fun as Europeans thought, even at the Sultan/Harem level.

18

The last thing that a housewife would want is for her maid to be prancing around her husband or sons in a sexy outfit. (Heck, in the Victorian era, a woman who wore that kind of outfit would have been arrested.) The worse the help looked, the better.

Of course, even in a neck-to-floor dress, maids were often an object of lust to the men in the household. For a Victorian man, sexual outlets were few: a wife, or a prostitute. Some turned to seducing the help. Many young men’s first sexual experience was with a maid.

This may be why the maid became a sexual fetish, and the outfit changed to suit the fantasy.

Aside from that, the sexy maid’s outfit would be impractical for work. Those frilly petticoats would quickly become filthy as she scrubbed the floor.

19

It was also a lot easier to tell the difference by sight between a slave and non-slave in the American South than in Ancient Rome.

20

Regarding the “French Maid,” volume 4 of “History of Private Life” by Philippe Aries and Georges Duby cover this topic, with pictures of 19th C. French household staff

(including my fave: two servants peeping through a keyhole and stifling their laughter, titled “Madame is Receiving”).