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.