SNARK WEEK: Gaposis

Support Frock Flicks with a small donation! During Snark Week and beyond, we’re grateful for your monthly pledges for exclusive content via Patreon or your one-time contributions via Ko-fi or PayPal to offset the costs of running this site. You can even buy our T-shirts and merch. Think of this like supporting public broadcasting, but with swearing and no tax deductions!

 

 

Snark Week is our annual chance to rant and also sometimes to explain WHY we rant. We’ve mentioned gaposis many times here, even highlighting it as just one element of “shit that doesn’t fit.” But we haven’t really explained what it is and why it annoys us. Enter Snark Week!

For once, I have some ground to stand on — “gaposis” seems to be an Actual Term that other people use too! It’s even on Dictionary.com, which defines it as “a noticeable gap or series of gaps, as between the fastened buttons or snaps on an overly tight garment.”

And in fact, we can date the term back at least to the 1940s!

In costuming circles, the term generally applies to a bodice that separates from its skirt at the waist, often showing the underlying waistband. This can happen if your bodice isn’t long enough, but also simply because the bodice ends directly at the waist — any movement at all can cause the bodice to scooch up and show the waistband underneath.

So why does what seems like a very little thing bug us so much? Because for most of history, dresses were just that: a dress, not a separate bodice and skirt. Sure, as you were making the thing you had a bodice and skirt, but these were generally sewn together making it a complete garment. And for those eras where that wasn’t the case, they didn’t like gaposis and so had methods for making sure the bodice and skirt didn’t separate.

Let’s take a look at some films and TV shows that fuck this up and talk about what would actually have been done in the period:

 

Gaposis: The Renaissance

Da Vinci’s Demons provides a great example of gaposis:

Why is this a problem? Well, most gowns of the 16th century were sewn together as one piece. Let’s look at the famous burial gown of Eleanor di Toledo: while it currently exists as two pieces, there’s no skirt waistband, and in fact you can see how the skirt was cut to mimic the waistline of the bodice. The skirt would have been pleated up and sewn to the bodice:

Another dress possibly belonging to Eleanor shows what this looks like sewn up — a dress, not a separate bodice and skirt:

So when we see the following, we get annoyed:

Even menswear can get in the fun. As Trystan discussed last year in her rant on pants, 16th-century menswear featured doublets that were “pointed” or laced to pants, turning them into a onesie. England’s Forgotten Queen missed the memo, giving us a doublet that hoicks up about 10″ PLUS a dickie instead of a shirt underneath:

From the medieval to the 17th century, you’d be seeing this:

 

Gaposis: The 17th Century

17th-century dresses took a different approach, but gaposis is still a problem in this time period, for example on this extra in Cutthroat Island:

Now, this was an era where formal gowns consisted of a separate bodice and skirt! Let’s look at a rare surviving gown:

Because the dress is so fragile, it’s not always displayed correctly, but when it is, what we see is a separate skirt that tucks under the bodice point. It then lays on top of the bodice’s tabs, which are like corset tabs, and is hooked to a cord that’s sewn along the bodice waistline where the tabs begin:

So we roll our eyes when we see:

 

Gaposis: The 18th Century

18th-century court dress was basically constructed like 17th-century formal dress plus the addition of wide panniers (hoops). The bodice has tabs, and the skirt attaches to a cord sewn along the bodice waistline. This system won’t work if the tabs aren’t there:

So it pains us to see:

18th-century fashionable dress was different, however. While you could get separate jackets and petticoats in the 1770s-90s, most “gowns” had their skirts sewn to the bodice. So this is a no go, unless it’s a jacket:

You just don’t see two-piece, separated dresses in this era:

Most jackets had a skirting or peplum or somehow extended past the waist in order to avoid gaposis:

So that’s what irritates me about this:

 

And why I love whoever on the Outlander costume team made this note:

 

Gaposis: The 19th Century

Now, the 19th century is an era in which you start to get separate bodices and skirts, primarily from then 1850s onwards. So you’d think we wouldn’t mock this:

But we will, because 19th-century people didn’t like gaposis any more than we did. Yes, separate bodices and skirts became increasingly common; in fact, you’d often have a day and evening bodice you could swap out and wear with the same skirt. But 99% of these that had natural waistlines were basted together before wearing, while the remaining 1% (okay I’m guessing on the numbers) used hooks and eyes like this dress:

By the 1870s, bodices often had an extended “basque,” meaning it went down past the waist, which solved the problem:

And, this method of either basting the bodice and skirt together or connecting them with hooks and eyes is a tried-and-true theatrical costuming technique:

So no, we don’t expect perfect historical accuracy when you’re dealing with film/TV and actors and dressers, but the technology exists to use modern streamlined approaches but avoid this:

I hope this post helps explain what the frock we’re talking about when we snark “gaposis”!