 History
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The
Lost History of the Canine Race
By Mary
Elizabeth Thurston
anthropology/museology
Excerpt from Chapter 9,
“Eye of the Beholder”
Book: The Lost History of the Canine Race
Hardcover
publisher Andrews and McMeel, 1996 Trade paperback publisher
Avon Books, 1997
Published here with the permission of the author.
Renaissance
canines fortunate enough to live with doting aristocrats
often enjoyed the same opulent fashions as their masters.
Tended to by professional groomers called “demoiselles,”
curly-coated retrieving breeds (thought to be progenitors of
the modern Poodle) invited creative embellishment in the
hands of itinerant canine stylists.
The
“Continental” clip, a partial, stylized shearing of the
dog, was an instant hit with the well-to-do, as they
transformed their pets into pseudolions--personal emblems of
power and prestige. The Continental clip experienced a
second surge in popularity nineteenth-century Paris, where
on any Sunday, citizens would be seen leading their dogs to
the banks of the Seine under the Pont-des-Arts, to awaiting
demoiselles. For a fee, the animals would be lathered,
immersed in sulfur water (to kill fleas), then sent fetching
a stick tossed into the river, after which they would be
dried then clipped to their owner’s desire.
It was during
this time, too, that canine coiffures were increasingly
patterned after women’s hairstyles. The “tonte en
macarons,” a cascade of coiled hair first worn by Princess
Eugénie, wife of Emperor Napoleon III, became the rage in
the 1890s, inspiring the “caniche cordé,” or corded
poodle. These dogs still sported Continental clips, but now
the fur on the shoulders and head was encouraged to mat
until it formed ropelike coils that trailed the ground.
Already rattled
by the growing presence of women in the world of dog
breeding, some old-school sportsmen grumbled that
traditional working breeds were compromised by fashionable
grooming styles. “Some owners tie the hair atop of the
Poodle’s head with a ribbon and send him out like a little
girl going to a party,” fretted Ernest Baynes at the turn
of the century.
The Roaring
Twenties ushered in a new fashion era for women and dogs
alike, who now had their tresses shorned in perky “page
boy” bobs, reflecting a new spirit of rebellion against
rigid Victorian moral strictures. Many newly liberated
women--single, wealthy and in no hurry to settle
down--abandoned their dainty lapdogs for more “manly”
breeds, such as Newfoundlands and German Shepherds, then
impertinently had the animals shorn in the same
“feminine” fashion as the Poodles.
Rebellious
canine fashions resurfaced again in the 1960s as hair and
clothing styles popularized by student protesters filtered
into mainstream society. Poodles seen strolling in New
York’s Central Park still sported Continental clips, but
now they were canine equivalents of “flower children,”
appropriately attired with real or plastic daisies, and in
some instances, dyed in psychedelic swirls of green, pink
and yellow. And for the first time in history it became
fashionable to own mongrels, the more mixed the animals’
“racial” makeup the better. Reflecting their
counterculture popularity, the coats of these dogs were left
long and natural.
More recently,
fancifully coifed canines have been the subject of popular
parody, as in a Lynda Barry cartoon depicting a defiant,
snarling Poodle with spiked hair, reading, “He’s small,
he’s black, he’s MAD AS HELL--he’s a POODLE WITH A
MOHAWK. You’ll never call him Fifi again!” In the same
vein, unkempt Poodles have become metaphors for anarchy, as
reflected in the popular movie Batman Returns (1992), in
which a bizarrely matted Miniature Poodle is employed by the
evil Penguin to carry bombs around Gotham City.
On the advent of
the 21st century, canine fashion has overcome its image as a
snobbish excess to be reborn as a legitimate means of
expressing concern and affection for companion animals. Now
a well-groomed and adorned dog seems not so much to
symbolize the domination of civilization over nature, but
the canine’s mastery of the human heart.
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