Is it all right to poke fun at the fashions of the past?
Why not? Every age has its sublimely absurd ideas of what is attractive, and we are no exception – our turn will surely come! My own son snorts and asks what we were thinking when we wore hip hugger pants with wide belts and bell bottom cuffs; “Why, we were cool!” I say, as I remind him of the brightly patterned, impossibly baggy shorts and nylon net string tees of his early teen years.
It is one of the current running jokes that has women of today anxiously asking, “Honey, does this make my butt look big?” If we could pose that decidedly indelicate question to the fashionable women of the 1880s, perhaps a truthful answer would be, “Well, I certainly hope so!”
Or perhaps they didn’t think of it in those terms at all.