Art: Venus Cacopyge

The Greeks had an unfailing eye for free-flowing beauty of line. Modern clothes designers have an anxious eye toward line too—but it is rarely free-flowing, and only beautiful if fashion says so.

In a girdle ad published in the U.S. last week, the upper left-hand corner showed a cherubic two-year-old girl, buff bare, climbing into a tub. The caption said: “Your derriere’s darling . . . when you’re two!”

Then came the punch line: “But you’re a big girl now. You need a [So & so girdle].” To show what was meant, the ad offered a full-length back view of a shapely brunette of voting age, presumably just before or after bathing—her derriere imprisoned (“dwindled down”) in a patented cylindrical casing designed to make it look as much as possible like that of a bee or a racing car.

Students of design have a name for this. They call it “the fashionable mono-buttock.”

There have been other ages when, in the name of art, the female figure has been cruelly repressed, e.g., in Victorian England, rigidly laced in its own stays, in China, where for 700 years women’s feet were bound, and in the U.S. in the 1920s, when fashion decreed that women must be breastless.

One of the glories of Greco-Roman art is the Venus Callipyge (Venus of the Beautiful Buttocks). The Greeks would have laughed themselves sick over the “dwindled-down derriere”*—and no doubt found a word for it.

Since the Greek for bad is kakos, it is pretty clear that the Greek for today’s fashionably mono-buttocked female would be Cacopyge.

* There is a record of a well-educated American woman who, till the age of 30, thought that the Londonderry Air was an anti-British French song.