You have to go back 100 years for the last time Western women devoted so much energy to festooning their derrières. In the 1870s, some ladies sported bustles robust enough to support an entire tea service.

As Bernard Rudofsky first noted in his book The Unfashionable Human Body: "If female dress were designed to follow a woman's contours, the bustle dress would fit the Hottentot woman like a glove. Yet although the women's silhouettes are identical, the American's majestic posterior is but a sartorial illusion."