by Rebecca George
The ‘Baroque’ look isn’t really a fashion statement; it’s more a state of mind. Any girl might become entranced with the exciting possibilities of tightly-laced corsets, enormous (and extremely restrictive) cage-crinolines, pouty red lips set against milk-white skin, velvety-black beauty spots, and vast sculptures of ash-blonde ringlets piled into absurd, phallic pinnacles. For those of us who enjoy the shameless artifice of ultra-feminine fashion, the decadent eighteenth-century Rococo look represents a whole universe of sensations to be explored - a lexicon of extreme and exaggerated styles, calculated to raise our admirers’ blood pressure to boiling point. Baroque fashions are shamelessly perverse and blatantly kinky, and it’s challenging to keep reminding oneself that conventional aristocratic ladies of the period actually wore such creations when out in public. Sometimes, it seems that the aristocratic milieu of the ancien régime was just one gigantic outdoor fetish party…