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First topless dresses
The topless dress fashion of a few years ago may have seemed like a new thing. It wasn't. In
fact an early purpose
of the corset was to show as much of the breast as possible. As early as 1388, Johann de
Mussi, a Lombard
author, wrote "Women show their breasts and it looks as if their breasts would wish to jump
from their bosom".
And he adds, reflectively, "Which gown would be beautiful if it did not show the breasts?" The
beautiful Agnes
Sorel (1409-1450) was said to display her shoulders and breasts, including the nipples. The
early Christian
Church termed the laced openings to women's bodices "the gates of hell". By the fifteenth
century much of the
breast was again being shown; and in James l's time young unmarried women displayed the
whole of their breasts.
John Hill, a sixteenth-century poet comments "That women theyr breastes dyd shew &
lay out." But the early
Anglo-Saxons were predated by centuries in the use of topless fashions. In various
Mediterranean lands of
antiquity the exposed breast was a commonplace.