“The waist, which is already, roughly speaking, indicated by the sash or girdle, but which, in consequence of the progressive differentiation of feminine clothing, comes to play a principal part in women’s dress, divides the woman’s body into thorax and abdomen. The fully clothed woman becomes an insect, a wasp, with two sharply defined emotional and sexual spheres, with a heavenly and an earthly division.”[105] With this classification and differentiation of clothing there now developed a fertile field for the activity of “fashion,” which therefore, as such, first really takes its rise in the middle ages. According to Sombart,[106] it was in the Italian States of the fifteenth century that it first became a living reality. Fashion is a product of the Christian middle ages; the specific element that this period introduced into feminine clothing--the corset--is a witness to Christian doctrine. Stratz remarks on this subject: “Strange as it may seem, it is very remarkably true that =the corset derives its origin from the Christian worship of God=. Owing to the strict ecclesiastical control in the middle ages--strict, at least, as regards public life--the dominant ascetic point of view demanded the fullest possible covering of the feminine body, and the =mortification of the flesh=; it insisted, at any rate, that those portions of the body should be withdrawn from the view of sinful man which are regarded as especially characteristic of the female sex. Through woman sin had entered the world, and therefore woman must, above all, take care to conceal as much as possible the sinful characteristics of her baser sex. Whilst man, by the greatest possible increase in breadth of shoulders and chest, endeavoured to suggest a more powerful and warlike aspect, we find that among women from the twelfth to the sixteenth century, the endeavour was dominant to make the breasts as flat and childlike and as narrow as possible, and for this purpose, =for the compression and obliteration of the breasts, an early form of the corset was employed=.”[107] It is characteristic that fashion later employed the corset in precisely the =opposite= sense--namely, in order to make the breasts “stand out more prominently above the upper margin of the corset, which continually became shorter.” Thus there arose a conflict between medieval fashion and the ascetic tendencies of the times. Fashion was victorious along the whole line, as we can learn in detail in Ritter’s interesting essay regarding the nudities of the middle ages.[108] Since the middle ages, two portions of the body have in the female sex been especially accentuated by clothing--the breasts, and the region of the hips and the buttocks.