Today, all you need is a
swipe
on Tinder: while in our current societies, flirting is mostly played out by photos on interposed screens, the BBC notes, in an article of January 17, a method dating back to the Victorian era.
A time when the ancestors of texting were in fact creative collage games, between audacity and impertinence.
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This technique dates back to the 1860s, when business cards were very popular among high-society Victorian families.
Synonymous with power and prestige, they took the form of small photographic portraits that it was customary to exchange as we do today with telephone numbers.
But the cupboards quickly overflowing with dozens of photos, what to do with all these cards?
According to several experts interviewed by the BBC, women, especially, had the habit of keeping them in dedicated photo albums.
Over time, the portraits on the cards were cut out and used in drawings and other whimsical and even surreal collages.
Patrizia Di Bello, professor of the history and theory of photography at Birkbeck University, London, explains that this hobby was perceived by its practitioners as a source of entertainment, without the aim of being exposed in the galleries.
The "artists" simply brought their works to dinners so that they could be admired there.
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Coded messages
When balls and dancing were abolished by Queen Victoria, who wished to project a more serious and respectable image of her reign, “young women holding collage albums became popular as they brought a new distraction to the court.
This gave them a social value, ”explains the expert to the BBC.
From this avant-garde living room art came games of mischief and mischief between suitors.
Bringing one's photo album to gatherings initially allowed for bonding and flirting, providing men and women "an excuse to sit side by side."
The collages had thus become a means of communicating, of exposing one's social level and degree of "desirability".
But also to exchange coded messages, between
private jokes
and puns, circumventing the rules of decorum.
husband and lover
This is the use made of it by Lady Filmer, cheeky wife of MP Sir Edmund Filmer, whose montages proved to be both daring and surprising. In one of them
(below)
, this “lady of hearts” portrayed herself there with her husband, her children, other family members and… her supposed lover Edward, Prince of Wales and eldest son of Queen Victoria, who sent her portraits almost daily. It was even rumored that one of Lady Filmer's daughters, nicknamed Queenie, was his. “The simple acquaintances of Lady Filmer were impressed by the fact that the Prince of Wales was part of her circle, explains Patrizia Di Bello. But those who were in on the secret felt pleasure in the gossip, even jealousy at the fact thatshe was exposing that relationship.”
Another edit, again by Lady Filmer, depicts a fox hunting scene.
She embodies the fox.
Them, her lovers, the pack of dogs.
Her husband in the distance, on foot, desperately trying to control these animals.
Lady Filmer, a free woman above all?
“There is an openly feminist side to Lady Filmer, slice Patrizia Di Bello.
She shows that men come after her, but if they catch her, they can devour her.
It's fun at first, then it gets disturbing.
She was taking a big risk.”
Much more timid (or perhaps shy?), the men preferred, for their part, to reserve their collages for the documentation of their daily life, travels, meetings, professional experiences.
The subtlety of a flirtation that did not say its name remains the prerogative of women.
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