Cleavage is the cleft between a woman's breasts lying over the sternum revealed by a garment with a low neckline. It is associated with low-cut women's clothing, such as evening gowns, swimwear, casual tops and other garments, designed to emphasize the display of breasts.
Some people regard use of cleavage as a form of feminine flirting or seduction, within the confines of community, peer group and personal standards of modesty, as much as for its aesthetic or erotic effect. Many women use cleavage to enhance their sexual attractiveness. Some people derive erotic pleasure from seeing a woman's cleavage, some derive pleasure in their female partner's exposing her cleavage, and some women expose their cleavage for the pleasure of their partner.
Décolletage (or décolleté, its adjectival form, in current French) is cleavage produced by a low-cut neckline that exposes the neck, shoulders and parts of the breasts, but not the nipple. In strict usage the term denoted the neckline, the zone extending about two handbreadths from the base of the neck down, obverse and recto.[1] Only after the French Revolution did the décolletage become larger in the front and smaller in the back.[2]
The International Federation of Associations of Anatomists (IFAA) has adopted the terms intermammary sulcus or intermammary cleft when referring to the area of cleavage between the breasts not including the breasts. For legal purpose it was noted by the United States federal courts that "anal cleft or cleavage" and "cleavage of the female breast" are so imprecise as to provide no guidance in defining them.[3]
When the lateral aspects of the breasts are uncovered, it is known as side cleavage, sidewinders or sideboob.[4][5]
Exposure of the underside of the breast, such as below an extremely short crop top, is known as neathage, Australian cleavage (because of the reference to Australia as down-under), bottom cleavage, reverse cleavage or underboob.[4][5] It is referred to by the term shitapai (shita+oppai: under-breasts) in Japanese.[6]
In European society, décolletage was often displayed in the dress of the late Middle Ages. This continued through the Victorian period. Corsets that enhance the cleavage were introduced in the mid 16th century.[7] By the late 18th century these cleavage enhancing corsets grew more dramatic in pushing the breasts upwards.[8] It is a feature of the evening gown, leotard, and bikini, among other fashions. In the French Enlightenment, there was a debate as to whether a woman's breasts were merely a sensual enticement or rather a natural gift to be offered from mother to child. In Moissy's play The True Mother, the title character rebukes her husband for treating her merely an object for his sexual gratification: "Are your senses so gross as to look on these breasts – the respectable treasures of nature – as merely an embellishment, destined to ornament the chest of women?"[9] Nearly a century later, also in France, a man from the provinces who attended a Court ball at the Tuilleries in Paris in 1855 was deeply shocked by the décolleté dresses and is said to have exclaimed in disgust: "I haven't seen anything like that since I was weaned!"[10]
For ordinary wear, high collars were, however, the norm for many years. When it became fashionable, around 1913, for dresses to be worn with a modest round or V-shaped neckline, this nonetheless deeply shocked clergymen all over the world. In the German Empire, all of the Roman Catholic bishops joined in issuing a pastoral letter attacking modern fashions.[11] Fashions became more restrained in terms of décolletage, while exposure of the leg became more permitted in Western societies, during World War I and remained so for nearly half a century.[12] From the 1960s onward, however, changing social mores allowed a greater display of cleavage in films, on television, and in everyday life.
Lingerie has long been designed to emphasize cleavage. The tight lacing of corsets worn in the 19th and early 20th centuries emphasized both cleavage and the size of the bust and hips. Ball or evening gowns especially were designed to display and emphasize the décolletage.[13][14] More recently, after corsets became unfashionable, brassieres and padding have served to project, display and emphasize the breasts, as has breast augmentation surgery.
British zoologist and ethologist Desmond Morris theorizes that cleavage is a sexual signal that imitates the image of the cleft between the buttocks,[16] which according to Morris in The Naked Ape is also unique to humans, other primates as a rule having much flatter buttocks.
Evolutionary psychologists theorize that humans' permanently enlarged breasts, in contrast to other primates' breasts, which only enlarge during ovulation, allowed females to "solicit male attention and investment even when they are not really fertile",[17] though Morris notes that in recent years there has been a trend toward reversing breast augmentations.[18][19] Several brassiere manufacturers, among them Wonderbra and Victoria's Secret, have become known for marketing products that enhance the décolletage. On the first Friday of April in South Africa, Wonderbra sponsors a National Cleavage Day.[20] According to social historian David Kunzle, waist confinement and the décolletage are the primary sexualization devices of Western costume.[21] Art historian James Laver argued that the changing standards of revealing the cleavage is more prominent in the evening dress than the day dress of women in the Western world.[22]
In Western and some other societies, there are differences of opinion as to how much cleavage exposure is acceptable in public.[23] In contemporary Western society, the extent to which a woman may expose her breasts depends on social and cultural context. Women's swimsuits and bikinis commonly reveal the tops and sides of the breasts. Displaying cleavage is considered permissible in many settings, and is even a sign of elegance and sophistication on many formal social occasions, but it may be prohibited by dress codes in settings such as workplaces and schools, where any display of the female breast may be considered inappropriate. Showing the nipples or areolae is almost always considered toplessness or partial nudity.
In the United States, in two separate incidents in 2007, Southwest Airlines crews asked travelers to modify their clothing, to wear sweaters, or to leave the plane because they did not consider the amount of cleavage displayed to be acceptable.[24] German Chancellor Angela Merkel created controversy when she wore a low-cut dress to the opening of the Oslo Opera House on 12 April 2008.[25][26][27]
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