I was so pleased to be asked to speak at the History Symposium this past month! It was a fantastic experience, and I strongly recommend that readers check out the rest of their offerings — there are years’ worth of presentations on all sorts of topics relating to the early nineteenth century, particularly the War of 1812. I’ve embedded my talk below, and I’m also including the text of my paper for those who prefer reading to listening. That being said, half of this video is Q&A, and I don’t have a transcript for that. Yet! It’s on my to-do list.
Corsetry has been a foundational aspect of women’s fashion from the early modern period to the 1960s, pun intended. As an anonymous contributor to the English fashion magazine La Belle Assemblée wrote in 1816 in advertisement of the editor’s wife’s business, “But in all dresses, how elegant soever their make, much depends on the proper display of the contour” — while the text was obviously biased, it’s very true that historical clothing worn as an outer layer depends entirely in its appearance on the underlying foundation. I’d like to start this discussion by placing the corset of the early nineteenth century into its historical context. Nothing in fashion history exists as a thing in and of itself: each garment is the result of historical processes that transformed its predecessors into what it is in the time that you’re speaking of it.
The earliest eighteenth century stays, like those of the late seventeenth century that accompanied the rise of the unboned mantua as fashionable dress, were sewn with continuous vertical boning channels covering the entire circumference of the body, as you can see in both of these (and sometimes even the length of the straps) and constructed with a wide neckline and low waist, creating a very narrow and long silhouette. In order to accommodate the hips, the lower edge of the stays would typically have to be slit to create tabs that could be pushed out of position. While minor changes occurred in the first few decades of the century, including the development of a strapless method of construction, as seen on this example from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the basic form and pattern of stays would not change for some time, leading to problems today when attempting to date these garments in museums beyond the general range of “most of the eighteenth centiry”.
This would change in the mid-1770s, not coincidentally at the same time that women’s outer clothing was undergoing massive changes in construction and style. Both were responding to the same forces in fashion: a desire for natural looks, and a move away from perceived artificiality. While fully-boned stays would continue to be worn for some time, the option of partial boning allowed for greater flexibility and breathability, and may have made these stays more easily altered to take changes in the fashionable silhouette into account — something that was significantly less necessary earlier in the century. A waistline at the natural level or just above it was also becoming part of fashion, allowing the stays to shorten. Another change was shaping that promoted a somewhat rounded bust, seen as less artificial than the front-flattening effect found in earlier stays, which you can see in the slightly bowed center-front edges that appear to be intended to be laced more open nearer the neckline. These stays were called “corsets” in French, as a diminutive of the word for fully-boned stays, “corps”, meaning body. “Corset” would then be adopted into English as the loan word corset.
True experimentation in construction and shape began to occur after the serious shift in the fashionable silhouette circa 1795: the arrival of the high waistline, just below the bust, that we now see as characteristic of the Regency period. The bust in the second half of the 1790s and the 1800s was to look as natural and full as possible, which meant that the traditional methods of stay construction would not do. There was general agreement that the body could still be encircled with well-fitted panels that had some amount of boning, but what could be done with the bust? A number of extant examples, like this set of stays from Historic Cherry Hill, are made to simply end just below the bust, pulling the wearer’s shift taut to give some support; on top of this, the gown would typically feature a front bodice lining that pinned together at center front for a second layer of support. On the other hand, some tried to create, essentially, gathered bra cups from first principles to sew directly into the stays, a process which lends somewhat more support but which I can attest to being much more difficult to do. The example from the Victoria & Albert Museum is also much shorter on the body than the Cherry Hill stays, despite its vestigial tabs, reflecting the understanding that the wearer’s natural body was more acceptable in this new climate. An article in the form of a fictional letter in La Belle Assemblee in 1807 claims that long stays “give a most ungraceful stiffness” and that “if we consult the painter and the sculpturist, we shall find that the natural beauty of a form consists in a moderate roundness, not in contracted flatness. I positively will not allow of your destroying the symmetry of nature, by the distortion of art … Continue, therefore, your simple corset; and so not, with your plump cheek and round arms, exhibit the body of a caged skeleton.”
At the end of the first decade of the nineteenth century, there were two strong contenders for what stays or corsets might be, reflecting the uncertainty inherent in fashion after several decades of wild change. But as the fullness of gowns built on drawstrings at the front neckline and waist slimmed down (losing the gathers almost entirely as the opening migrated to the back), the body was more on display, and it was clearly felt that the torso needed more control again, just as fashionable inspiration was more frequently coming from medieval and early modern garments than from the completely uncorseted Greeks, Romans, and Etruscans. The original long corset à la Ninon was shown in the Journal des Dames et des Modes in 1810, and it would win out in the long term, serving as the pattern for corsets for the next several decades — we can find patterns in women’s magazines for making corsets at home along these lines into the 1850s. The fact that returning to a longer, more figure-defining corset was seen as a historic revival is evident in the name, which refers to Ninon de l’Enclos (born 1620 and died 1705), a French writer and courtesan whose portraits inspired a few nineteenth-century fashions.
And here is a literal pattern to help illustrate: this is the pattern for a corset in the Fenimore Art Museum collection, which I included in Regency Women’s Dress, although I have redrawn it to be clearer here. As you can see, the body is essentially a rectangle with slits cut into it; these slits are filled with triangular gussets that allow the rectangle to take on a three-dimensional shape to wrap and adjust the body. I should also note that the back edges of this corset and many others are cut with a sinuous curve that again allows for the three-dimensionality of the body: it follows the dip in of the spine and then flares out again for the backside. Patterns of extant garments are an essential part of what Hilary Davidson terms the “embodied turn” of fashion history scholarship. She writes in her article “The Embodied Turn: Making and Remaking Dress as an Academic Practice”, “By an “embodied turn”, I mean the trend for scholars of history to appreciate and incorporate embodied, experiential, implicit or tacit knowledges gained through making and doing into their study of history.”* She also suggests that we call this “experimental history”, reflecting the concept of “experimental archaeology”, a type of scholarship in which people use or create reproductions of archaeological finds to better understand their original contexts. In experimental dress history, we can reproduce and then wear historical garments in order to better understand how their original makers and wearers managed.
* Hilary Davidson (2019): “The Embodied Turn: Making and Remaking Dress as an Academic Practice”, Fashion Theory, DOI: 10.1080/1362704X.2019.1603859
Embodied study of corsetry has taught me many things about these garments. (Here are two photos of me doing embodied study of the period I’m discussing today: on the right in the late 1790s chemise gown I made based on one in the New York State Museum as part of my qualifying paper at FIT and a self-drafted wool spencer; on the left in my copy of the Cherry Hill stays and a gown taken from a pattern in Regency Women’s Dress.) I used to believe the common idea that this style of corset was relatively easy to date based on the shaping: that they were made to be more columnar in the early years of their use, when a narrow waist was not required, and that as fashion took on a more hourglass silhouette through the 1820s and 1830s, the corset became more and more shapely and more and more boned in order to restrict the body. What experience has taught me is that it is more comfortable to wear a corset with a waist somewhat narrower than my own and hips somewhat wider. The waist of the corset will push body fat down toward the abdomen and the hips, and the waist seems to be the most comfortable place to be squeezed and to anchor the corset. A corset without enough of a waist squeezes elsewhere, like the kidneys, hips, or ribs, and can even be painful. (The most uncomfortable corset I’ve ever worn fit my proportions horizontally very well, but had the waist a few inches too low for me.) Therefore, I suspect that the shape of the corset in the first half of the century reflects the shape of the body beneath it even more than it does the fashionable silhouette, with a more natural hourglass figure actually requiring an hourglass-shaped corset even when fashion decrees that it’s not necessary. I’ve also learned that the amount of corset boning, or the materials used in it, have very little to do with how restrictive a corset is. It is the fabric of the corset, the way it is cut and constructed, that acts on the body: the boning (or cording) exists to keep the fabric from buckling or even falling. A corset does not inherently act more on the body based on the amount of boning in it; it does not give the wearer a smaller waist. There is a lot of work to be done in determining a true chronology of corsets based on stylistic elements from 1810 to about 1860, when strapless, industrially-made corsets with different construction patterns completely unseated this method.
The topic of learning from making and wearing historical corsets is a relevant place to change to tightlacing, the practice of tightening a corset to achieve a very small waist, a contentious topic that is usually discussed without any reference to embodied evidence. There is a very long history of discourse, in the modern sense, because it was more than just a nebulously-defined aesthetic practice. Valerie Steele writes in The Corset: A Cultural History: “Significantly, there was no agreement about the precise definition of ‘tight-lacing’. Women usually denied that they personally tight-laced. It was always someone else, such as an actress or a servant or a foolish young girl, who was accused of being a tight-lacer.” (p. 87) As a result, it is difficult to get any idea of how or if any women were actually doing it — I tend to take it as a rhetorical tool more than a factual description of common practice. Early stories about the origins of tight-lacing related it to Catherine de’ Medici, early to mid-sixteenth-century French consort and queen mother; with traditional French negativity toward active queens and toward Italians, she was positioned as a kind of torturer who sadistically forced her ladies to achieve 13” waists. Tight-lacing was an expression of immorality, related to infanticide and child abuse because it was seen as harming a woman’s fertility in general or more specifically her fetus if she were pregnant, and obviously derived from a desire for extramarital male attention. This lent the topic a great weight in the popular consciousness. However, some perspectives put an even greater weight on the idea of corset-wearers hurting themselves, and these are the ones that tend to be taken most seriously today. As early as the late sixteenth century, doctors were claiming that lacing stays too tightly had led to cases of women dropping dead, going into a decline, or developing bad breath, and they would go on to add more and more fatal or uncomfortable conditions to the list despite little to no evidence of anything more than a correlation: easy to find, since such a large proportion of women wore some form of supportive undergarment.
In the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, pop culture focused on the idea of stays as expressions of vanity and repression. The motif of a woman being laced tightly into her stays by a man, as seen here on the left with Fashion before Ease, appears multiple times: it plays on the perception of tight-lacing as both done cruelly to the corset-wearer, represented here as Britannia, the personification of Great Britain, by a thin man who personifies Revolutionary France, and being done at her behest for her decision to put fashion before ease. The corseted woman is often portrayed as unattractive, with the intention of showing her as laughable for trying to become attractive while also condemning her for the methods she uses to attempt to do so. I am not really getting into the complex topic of male corsetry in this presentation, but speaking of perceptions of corsetry and tight-lacing as expressions of vanity, one must reference the Regency-era cartoons such as Lacing a Dandy, which display a man of the well-dressed set being tightly laced by a Black servant and a valet into a narrow waist, accentuated by excessive padding. He is made to look completely ridiculous, in part because corsetry is presumed to be a feminine vice.
Tight-lacing has been represented mostly in Victorian costume dramas, perhaps because most representations of the early nineteenth century have been straightforward Austen adaptations that allow for very little corset time, but Bridgerton is well known for featuring it in the first scene of the first episode, intercutting clips of Prudence Featherington and Daphne Bridgerton preparing for their court presentations. It follows the satires of the day in portraying tight-lacing as ridiculous and vain by assigning it to Prudence, in contrast with Daphne, whose natural beauty and thinness require much less effort. Prudence’s tight-lacing is particularly ridiculous in context because the fashions of the period did not require a small waist for women: hourglass figures could not be well observed in high-waisted gowns. From the perspective of having made and worn many corsets, it is also impossible: her corset is not made with ease in the hips to allow for the movement of abdominal fat away from the waist, and is long enough that this fat has absolutely nowhere to go. The actor playing the lady’s maid lacing her is simply pulling on laces that aren’t making the corset tighter at all.
Thank you so much for listening to my talk. I’d be more than happy to elaborate on any of this, or to answer questions about early nineteenth-century fashion or the embodied practice of fashion history.
Mimic of Modes 