ACTRESSES AS WORKING WOMEN of white satin and multiple transparent skirts, from which your legs will emerge, rosy under their stockings… He will tell you again that there is nothing comparable to you at the Opera…or in Eden!77 Such dishabille may have been ‘natural’ in the Second Empire, but it was never ‘moral’ attire After the 1830s, the negligée of Romantic fashion was improper, but the ballerina constantly recalled it in what became her uniform and remained as the sign of her occupation The male reader of La Vie Parisienne is described as wanting to put the petticoats on a bride, not take them off, so like a true fetish they functioned as a surrogate for their referent and were stimulating in and of themselves In Intrigues and Confession of a Ballet Girl an erotic novel dating from the early 1870s, the narrator describes her first rehearsal in the corps de ballet of Drury Lane Theatre: What a novel scene; here were girls of all ages, from ten to twenty…each dressed as their fancy pleased them; some with short skirts barely reaching to the knee, others with loose drawers, without skirt at all; most of them had light polka jackets made either of cotton or silk, and all with fleshings that reached from the waist downwards By this style of dress their limbs were as free as when they appeared on the stage at night.78 These ‘fleshings’ are pink-coloured tights, the article most heavily invested with indexical signification of skin, eroticism, and sexual stimulation The Mysteries of Verbena House, the pornographic novel of 1882 sometimes ascribed to the journalist and dramatist George Augustus Sala, graphically describes the effect of tights on the dancer, as well as their contiguity with earlier erotic cross-dressing: A lady, putting on her riding trousers becomes, consciously or unconsciously, akin to a hoyden assuming man’s clothes, or nearer still, to a ballet girl drawing on her tights She is subject to contact of the most perilous kind The warm close substance that passes close to her flesh, that clasps her loins, and embraces her bum, and insinuates itself between her thighs, has, all senseless leather, cloth, or silk, as the case may be, something of the nature of a man’s hand in it 134