The Corset of History

"It's too big? I thought it was too small!"

...

An accessory for the Telescope of History? Perhaps.

The other day at work I got to help someone try on a corset, one of the modern ones we have lying around just for such a purpose. (I own several myself, although I was too lazy to put one on that morning and had ended up shuffling into the other work-owned one just for fun.) She was the first visitor who wasn't too nervous to try it--in fact, she was downright excited as I helped her into it with a minimum of poking and prodding. It wasn't a smooth process, as I discovered the top clasp of the busk was missing* and it was, as suggested above, too big for her. But we had a great time. She was fascinated by the feeling of a garment we have, culturally, discarded (despite centuries of successful incorporation into fashion in different forms**), and of course, dressing up in historical outfits is a blast. I marvel that I can get paid to do it, sometimes.

Fine. That was probably the best part of my day. So what is the Corset of History?

I spent much of the rest of the day, when I wasn't actually slinging corsets about, looking through a really wonderful book of women's fashion in Britain from the late 18th through the early 20th centuries. Specifically, I was reading up on the waist sizes of these dresses, something I was curious about ever since a (real) Victorian dress was up for sale on eBay and I noticed that it quite exactly fit my corseted dimensions.** And what makes this book so good is that it's all based on actual surviving clothing, carefully drawn, measured, deconstructed (metaphorically), and placed in the context of current trends. And what this means is that, for once, we have a measure of how things actually worked for women of the time.

If the Telescope is all about period-based lumping, the Corset is about the idealization and the stereotype.

We often get onto the topic of corsets at work because there are two striking posters advertizing "Celebrated C.B. Corsets",*** which gets people commenting--usually in a negative way, because they're the ones who don't dare actually try one on. (Seriously, they're fine to wear, unless you're doing it up crazy tight. Mind you, I don't mind not having to wear one every day. It takes forever to put on (relatively speaking), is very warm, and means I can't slouch, which is probably for the best but still isn't a comfortable posture for me for long periods, because I'm broken. But it's been replaced by some really unhealthy diets and the ideal of skinniness hasn't gone away--in fact, it's become even more a cultural fetish of late, since along with your corseted waist you were generally supposed to have some curves!--only now there aren't the fashion tools to help women accomplish this look.)

And sure, the advertisements show some seriously hourglass-shaped women, with a lovely, small waist. It's actually lovely artwork. But somehow this gets translated instantly into a perception of the reality of the period. Caveat time: sure, some women did go in for tightlacing; some still do. Sometimes it was more in fashion than others. And some of the stories that you hear about breaking bones are true; certainly, wearing a tight corset will, over time, reshape your ribcage. But none of that matters. What's going on here is that, despite the fact that this pictures are a) advertizements and b) not actual photographs, but drawings, that image instantly becomes that of every woman in the Victorian period (or the 18th century, let's be honest, because of the Telescope and the fact that people really don't know what period they're imagining (I know this because they ask)).

That's a problem. The movies don't help here because of the obligatory "put the girl in tight stays"**** scene--think Pirates of the Caribbean 1, anyone? But in history, women were real women who had real lives to live, and most of them didn't have the luxury of not being able to bend down.

To return to my research in the book, it's not a huge sampling because not all of the dresses had the waist sizes marked--but many of them did. The smallest waist I saw was 19 inches. That's pretty darn tiny; I think it was for a younger woman, and was definitely one of the more "elite" dresses there. So yes! People did make their waists very tiny, sometimes--if they were rich and would never have to do much, and if fashion was a major concern for them, and above all if they were actually built to be able to do this.

This caveat is important. There were waists of 30 inches or more, with bodices on--that's more than mine without. There were dresses owned by the same person from different periods in her life; the waistline got larger over time as she aged.

And after Miss-19-Inch, I think (off the top of my head) there was one at about 22, and then most were 24 and up. 25 inchest-27 was very common, right about where I'm at if I wear a very-comfortably-laced corset. I'm practically Victorian!

Because these women were all different sizes and shapes, and they had lives to live. The mistake that's being made at the museum is to take an advertisement as reality--literally like looking at a fashion mag today and saying "how did women manage to go around, live, work, play, without an ounce of fat or muscle on them?"***** Well, they don't. Models are not your average woman, even if the photo itself is accurate. The cultural ideal itself is interesting, if you make sure to bear in mind that it actually evolved over the decades, with looser/tighter looks, and even entirely different body shapes (think the shift from the Victorian hourglass to the Edwardian S-bend, visible even in the late 1890s) coming in and out of style. And looking at the models in a modern magazine might give you information about why it is some women diet and why dolls like Barbie are the subject of social commentary. But the assumption that if you were a Victorian woman (Telescope! because that was totally a thing), you would have to be squeezing yourself down to a 16-inch waist (considered the ideal among corset-connoisseurs today), is just wrong. And heck, even if you did, your body would get used to it eventually. It's only because we're not trained to it any more that corsets--which, on the scale of ridiculous fashions, is actually fairly tame in terms of long-term body impact--can be uncomfortable.******

There's also the issue that the haute couture of the rich is a lousy model for the rest of society, and I'm saying this as someone who studies the aristocracy. Corsets, as a fashion item, were not restricted to the elite, but the luxury of adhering to tiny waistlines would not have been available universally. People have always been willing to do stupid things for fashion, but there's a reason that such fashions are usually a status symbol--the extremes don't apply to most people. Once the ideal has spread to cover all of society, we're in real trouble about how we understand the actual significance of cultural elements, and the real experience of the time.

In short, the Corset of History warns us not to get stuck in the image, and to try the damn corset on.


*How is this even possible to break? I don't know.
**Sadly, it was too delicate for actual wear. Weep.
***Did you know Victorians did "hot pink"? I didn't.
****Yes, stays rather than corsets usually (if fashion historians want to quibble, feel free, but I'm not one and I'm just talking shape here), because those straight-sided creatures are distinctly less human-shaped and are going to be a lot cosier on the ol' ribs there. Regardless of the fact that in some movies (Disney's Brave leaps to mind) that's not even a period garment. Medieval corsets had an entirely different construction, without ribs (so far as I know).
*****This is not to attack models, but the fact that the pictures are so often airbrushed (increasingly less often, however) means that their relationship to reality is actually about as good as the Victorian corset drawings.
******Unless you break a rib. That's always uncofmrotable.