ABSTRACT
Gender inuence was of crucial importance in stays’ design and form, and for the rst three-quarters of the eighteenth century, male staymakers brought a particular form of design to stays. I suggest that it was a change in composition of makers in the latter part of the century that prompted a change in the nature of stays and thereby of the female form. Yet while scholars have explored in some depth the subject of dress and gender roles, little has been written about the relationship between dress and gender identity of those who created it.1 Discussions of design usually centre on what are sometimes seen as higher art forms, namely ne art, architecture and decorative arts, and seldom include dress. As Anne Hollander has remarked, ‘Clothing might be thought to claim the more serious kind of attention given to architecture, if its materials had comparable permanence and the size of its examples more command over the eye’.2
