Milk-bottle shoulders

Jack Malvern, writing in The Times, describes as ‘a woman with milk-bottle shoulders’ Olivia Boteler Porter, the subject of a portrait held in the Bowes Museum in Durham now said to be by Van Dyck.

Milk-bottle shoulders as a term used to describe sloping shoulders does not seem to be in widespread use at all – not in the OED & Google turned up only one result.

Links
How a lady came out of the closet
Van Dyck portrait spotted online
Related posts
Sloping shoulders

Professor Daphne Brooker

Daphne Brooker, fashion teacher, died in February aged 84. I must admit I had never heard of her until I read her obituary on the same page as that of Araminta, Lady Aldington.

For 30 years she taught at [what is now the University of] Kingston, stressing the need for teachers to give as much emphasis to the doing, making & organising, and to the skills of craftsmanship, manufacturing & marketing of goods, as to analysis, criticism & the acquisition of knowledge.

A true heroine for feminists.

What really caught my eye however was a photo taken in the early 1950s when she had a brief & personally unfulfilling career as a model, which included a front cover of Vogue.

Sloping shoulders!

Links
DAPHNE BROOKER: Fashion Pioneer
Pioneer of university fashion education dies

Related posts
Sloping shoulders
Shoulders
Shoulders Again
Last post for clavicles

Last post for clavicles

I must put an end to this obsession with sloping shoulders. It is only made worse by the daily bombardment of pictures of the naked clavicles of current fashion

This time, with the help of Google Books, I found an explanation in A Handbook of Anatomy for Art Students by Arthur Thomson

I should have known it would take an artist to teach me how to see

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The clavicle – the one part of the female anatomy that is fat-proof throughout her life - Lisa Armstrong

Shoulders

Another non-modern picture of a woman with sloping shoulders. Will they ever come back into fashion again?

Not if the modern models amazingly horizontal collar bones are any guide

Sloping shoulders

I have often wondered why some people have shoulders which slope down /\ while others go straight across?

Google brought me anatomical diagrams, descriptions of alarming diseases of which sloping shoulders may be a symptom, information on wine bottles & collecting old ones, conformation of horses, fashion tips on how to disguise them, fashion history on eras when sloping shoulders were the bees knees, one barred site deemed to be malicious, & the revelation that I am a Uranian ectomorph. Well I must be because of my personality, bodyshape & the way I sit (back curved, feet up. I know)

But I still do not know if human shoulders slope down because of the angle of their collarbone, the formation of their muscles, or what