Featured image: “Vrouw in een tournure. The Grecian Bend.” (“Woman in bustle. The Grecian Bend.”) Hand-coloured albumen print, part of stereoscopic photograph, created between 1852-1863. Rijksmuseum. Source: wikimendia commons.
By Fotis Kalivas
The Grecian bend denotes a popular trend among Victorian socialites and fashion-daring women during the late 1860s — early 1870s. Loosely inspired by ancient Greek vases and statues, women appeared to slightly incline forward — their hips pushed back with exaggerated curves through corsetry, high heels, padding and visual illusions — to embody the concept of the Grecian bend. Although it was a controversial trend for Victorians, the Grecian bend originated in the Regency era. Harper Franklin explains that during the mid-1810s a new frame replaced the column-like figure of fashionable women, a frame which favoured a bustle pad around the already high empire waist, resulting “in a hump right below the shoulder blades, giving women a round-backed appearance known as the ‘Grecian bend’”. The historical background of the posture suggests why it was called Grecian: one of the main characteristics of the Regency era was the emphasis on ancient Greece, with Hellenism influencing aesthetics at every level.
“The Grecian Bend.” Broadside published by A. W. Auner, Philadelphia (PA). Helen Hartness Flanders Collection at Middlebury College.
A song entitled “Grecian Bend” encapsulates the Victorian satirical attitude towards the trend of the Grecian bend. Fashion-forward women are the subject of this sex-targeted ridicule, which focuses on their bended posture. The term is used in the song lyrics to shame women’s innovative aesthetic demonstrations of agency; as the lyrics imply, the bend is so steep that observers cannot but presume that the “beautiful girls” “have been all day behind a plow”, working like farm animals to achieve the desired silhouette.
Public discourse surrounding the Grecian bend frequently involved degrading animal comparisons. Through pamphlets, sheet music, and newspaper caricatures, the women who adopted the trend were visually transformed, often depicted as little more than frightened cats or humped camels to ridicule their innovative aesthetic and agency.
“The Last of the Grecian Bend.” Illustration from pamphlet. New York, 1848. New York Historical Society General Collections.
For example, this illustration from a pamphlet published in New York in 1848 (The New York Historical General Collections) displays a twisted evolution from the middle-class woman with the Grecian bend to a camel. Her silhouette is distorted, aiming to dismiss this fashion trend as an absurd result of capricious vanity. The misogynist as well as the racially insensitive undertones are apparent, with the camel representing the uncivilized desert slowly torturing the poor American woman and stripping her of her humanity. Similar satirical views of the Grecian bend appeared not only in sketches and lithographs but also in prose.
In the narrative poem The True Grecian Bend (1868), Larry Leigh claims that he has uncovered the hidden origins of the trend and will embark on a journey to tell the story of how it rose into popularity. The satirical poem tracks down the first woman who introduced the Grecian pose: a young French woman suffering from spinal disease: “Because of a weakness of brain and of spine (both organs, alas! being in a decline)”, she exaggerates her back pain to become fashionable anew. Her weapons are a bustle and a parasol and through their aid she can step out into society (Warner, 1868, p. 10). The author underlines the young woman’s medical condition to further police those who adopt her posture, deliberately implying that women had devolved into such slaves of fashion that they willingly copy physical illness.
The story ends with an attempt to appeal to the female reader’s morality by introducing a poor mother with her two sleeping children. This mother is bent over her table knitting while looking at her children in the dark, as the narrator praises her for her resilience and humbleness:
O brave, weary mother! the morning has come;
You’re hungry and cold, but the work is not done.
Thus through the sad seasons she’s bent o’er her knee
So low that her back has a curve, don’t you see—
A curve truly Grecian! I’m sure you would find,
Should you dress her in fashionable clothes of the kind
Worn now, she’d look “stylish” and have quite an “air.”
Her “bend” is more perfect by far, I declare,
Than that of our ladies so fine and so gay
Who walk in the avenues day after day;
And surely an outline by Nature designed,
Is much the best model, if you are inclined,
Fair lady, to triumph and truly intend
To study as artist the “true Grecian bend.” (1868, p. 44)
The true Grecian bend for Leigh consists of the mother’s virtues rather than the frivolous and artificial nature of fashion fanatics and upper-class women who, in his eyes, should strive to act more like the mother in the poem. Therefore, he represents the Grecian bend not as a celebration or an appreciation of Greek culture or the Greek arts but as a façade with no real purpose.
On the other hand, the American journal The College Courant recognizes the Grecian connotations of the bend. The article argues that magazines misinform the public by attributing the Grecian bend’s popularity to a specific person such as Empress Eugénie de Montijo: “If it had the origin which he [the Parisian correspondent] supposes, it would have been called the French bend, and suffered nothing in point of popularity” (1868, p. 154). Yet, the Grecian Bend is later described as originally an act of conscious shame. The College Courant cites John G. Saxe, a poet who called the Grecian bend “Colic Stoop”, arguing that:
… [the] real origin of the “Grecian Bend” is as patent as its adoption by fashionable women is ridiculous. Ladies who have justly admired the gracefully stooping posture of the Medician Venus, and other nude figures, from the hands of the Greek sculptors, have failed to reflect that the curve in those beautiful forms is gradual and unbroken by corsets at the waist; and, above all, that their stooping posture is a natural, and therefore graceful, attempt to hide what they can of their nakedness. “Clothed and in her right mind”, no sensible woman will think of imitating in public the shrinking stoop of conscious indecency. (1868, p. 154)
The logical nature of this observation constructs a taxonomy of decency: it suggests that the ancient Greek statues are inherently indecent due to their undress, elevating the sensible Victorian woman to superior moral standing. The extract cautions the Victorian woman against wasting her dignity by adopting a posture that borders on a lewd fantasy. Furthermore, the appreciation for the Venus de Milo and the naked forms of Greek statues is distinctly fetishized. They cannot be seen simply as figures; they are primarily nude, scandalous objects, existing only to shock the viewer. Thus, the Grecian bend is granted its historical context but is denied any genuine substance it might have held as a fashion trend.
Works Cited
Franklin, Harper. “1810-1820” Fashion History Timeline, 1 Jun 2020, https://fashionhistory.fitnyc.edu/1810-1819/.
Grecian Bend. (n.d.). [Pamphlets]. Philadelphia, PA : A. W. Auner. The Helen Hartness Flanders Collection at Middlebury College. https://jstor.org/stable/community.35445030
THE GRECIAN BEND. (1868). The College Courant, 3 (10), 19 Sep 1868, p. 154. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44105506
N-YHS General Collections. [illustration]. The New York Historical, New York City, United States, https://www.nyhistory.org/blogs/making-fun-of-fashion
Rijksmuseum. (1852-1863). Vrouw in een tournure. The Grecian Bend. Wikimedia Commons. Retrieved 7/11/2025. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vrouw_in_een_tournure_The_Grecian_Bend,_RP-F-F10727.jpg.
Warner, L. T. (1868). The true Grecian bend: a story in verse. New York, J. S. Redfield. [Pdf] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/31025142/
