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marzipanandminutiae · 2 years

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do you have any sources about corsets not actually being harmful/tightlacing not being a common thing/men not actually liking women's fashion of the time (ESPECIALLY bustles)? i got into an minor argument with my history teacher today about you guess what and i told her i'd send her my sources and now i have to or i'll look like a clown and i figured that this is the best place to ask bc if you don't at least one of your followers will.

I'm assuming you got here from my post on the subject? The existence of those satirical cartoons is a good place to start in terms of men mocking women's fashion- cartoonists seldom satirize social trends they admire, in my understanding. And to be clear, my point was less that All Men Hated These Styles and more that they were things women largely came up with ourselves rather than burdens we had thrust upon us by the patriarchy.

As for corsets being harmful...I'd say the burden of proof is on the claimant. Can your teacher prove that women were seriously injured en masse by their corsets, to the standard of a modern medical researcher? That means we're not counting anatomical illustrations by doctors who had never seen the phenomena they were drawing, dented organs in museum collections that have dicey undocumented provenance, photographs that may well have been edited, quasi-pornographic letters to magazines whose veracity cannot be proven, demonstrably false legends like that of the "fainting room," etc.

She should also be able to account for the numerous images of working women, athletes, dancers, opera singers, etc. wearing corsets. for these I recommend this Karolina Zebrowska video, with an more extensive collection than I could curate on such short notice (skip to 1:09; before then it's just modern actresses who were forced into ill-fitting corsets talking about their woes). If she asks how we can tell those women are wearing corsets, it's by the very distinctive silhouette and obviously supported/uplifted breasts.

This article about a tightlacer who got an MRI while corseted may also be of interest. Remember, most Victorian women didn't tightlace (to my knowledge), so that's even more extreme than the 19th century norm.

Also just. I wear corsets, frequently. A lot of my friends do, too, some even as their everyday breast support garment in lieu of a bra. In my personal experience, if worn the way Josephine Q. Victorian seems to have (laced down 1-3", over some sort of liner garment like a chemise), they're not torturous unless you happen to be uncomfortable with tight-fitting clothing in general. Sure, the way I move is different in a corset, but like...clothes impact our bodies. Be they shoes, tight-fitting jeans, miniskirts that make bending over a dangerous proposition re: underwear showing, or really any garment you could ever put on. Your body is never truly in a natural, unaltered state while you are clothed. And that's not inherently bad, obviously.

Yes, there were women who disliked wearing corsets. There were women who used them in uncomfortable and ill-advised ways. There was social pressure on women to wear certain things and look a certain way. I would not deny any of that- those things are all true nowadays, too, if you sub "corset" for any other foundation garment.

But corsets were not inherently harmful, patriarchal torture devices with no real purpose. That's my only argument here, and I feel the evidence is in my favor.

Best of luck!

#ask #anon #dress history #victorian #corsets #hope I don't get into a proxy war with anon's teacher though #long post #the kids are alright sometimes

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loiskane · 3 years

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Costumers pls let actresses wear shifts under corsets, it's not supposed to go on bare skin.

Or even better, showrunners, producers, writers, directors who tell costumers to do this, please stop.

#the nevers #dickinson #and many more #i'm sure most people well versed in historical clothing and costuming are well aware of this #which would be most people who work on historical shows and films #but it's sexy or whatever so in most things people wear corsets on bare skin and i want to scream #and they're not properly fitted either too many times #or idk what is the reason but it bothers me #and let's not even get into things like thightlacing portrayed as the norm when it never was #especially in eras when there was no tightlacing period #like in the 18th century #looking at you pirates of the Caribbean #or in regency england when what your waist looks like doesn't matter because the gowns had straight lines so you CAN'T SEE THE WAISTLINE #looking at you bridgerton #honestly the costuming on that show #people gave so much shit to reign for what the costumes looked like #but they hired someone with no prior experience with historical shows and have her a cw budget and said don't make it look accurate #she tried her best and while they're ahistocial so many of them were gorgeous esp in later seasons #meanwhile the costume designer on bridgerton was hired because she mostly worked on films with a contemporary setting #which is fine #but based on the things she said it seems like she thinks historical fashion is boring and she's here to make it fun #which is also fine but the end result is an eyesore sorry #also when she said the colors are super vibrant on the show bc she looked at regency era illustrations and they were boring & not colourful #they are 200 years old OF COURSE they are faded ma'am #anyway #i went off on the costume designer oops #i don't even like regency fashion that much but you can make it look beautiful #like emma 2020 #the designer used actual existing gowns from the period as inspiration #and they're not colourless or boring

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mimeparadox · 3 years

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The New Half-Truths about Corsets

As true as it is that corsets are often misrepresented in audiovisual and written media, and as glad as I am to see people defending them, GOD, am I annoyed by the current discourse. Not because the defenders are wrong —they’re not, in general terms—but because Twitter, Instagram, and their incentivitization of easily digestible sound bites over nuance haves stripped the conversation from all the complexity inherent in a subject as big as corsets. In seeking to be more accurate, corset defenders have often just muddied the water further, with a brand-new set of half-truths.

Here are my favorite (least favorite) talking points.

“Corsets are literally just bras!”

As a cis dude, I’ve never had reason or occasion to wear bras. I have worn corsets, though, and let me tell you, things like having to take off one’s boots after one has been out in the snow while wearing a corset is work—moreso, I imagine, that if I’d been wearing a bra. Actually putting on boots before a corset? Even harder, enough that “boots before corsets” is a common bit of advice. Corsets aren’t torture, but they do force one to rethink how they interact with the world, in ways different than bras do.

To be less glib though, yes, corsets could and did provide the sort of breast support that is now provided by bras. This doesn’t render the multiple differences irrelevant! For one, breast support is the one thing bras are meant to do: with corsets, it is secondary or even inessential, evidenced by all the corsets that do not provide breast support, such as corsets for men, old-timey corsets for kids, and underbust corsets, which are still definitely corsets.

(Megan Fox in Jonah Hex, wearing a corset that is doing exactly the same thing as a bra. Yes, I know it’s not historically accurate; that is not the point.)

What most miffs me about this argument is that it is exceedingly reductive, and displays simplistic thinking regarding both corsets and bras. Because yes, corsets were like bras…and? What is this argument trying to say, given that bras their own baggage? Is the argument that corsets aren’t torture because corsets are bras? Plenty of people find bras uncomfortable, and something to be abandoned as soon as it becomes feasible. Corsets were purely practical because corsets are bras? Plenty of bras exist for primarily aesthetic purposes—some even do a fair amount of shaping. In the end, both garments have complicated, multifaceted, and distinct features, histories, and semiotics, and trying to equate them in a single sentence says nothing useful about either of them.

“Stays are not corsets!”

Amusingly, this argument seems somewhat incompatible with the previous one, given that stays have much more in common with corsets than with bras, but here we are.

Yes, 18th- and early 19th-century stays are significantly distinct from the corsets that we see later in the latter century, and if someone wants to don Bridgerton-inspired looks that accurately reflect Regency fashions, they should not look at Victorian corsets to obtain it. And yes, one can make the case that stays and corsets were entirely different animals.

Here’s the thing, though: historically, that’s not a case that people made. Corsets are we know them weren’t considered to be a completely different thing from stays, but rather a different style of stays—two different breeds of dog, perhaps, but dogs all the same. Once the term corset entered regular parlance, the two terms were usually used interchangeably, as can be seen in multiple 19th century documents, including technical ones where differences between the two, if they existed, would have been noted.

The Duties of a Lady's Maid: With Directions for Conduct, and Numerous Receipts for the Toilette (1825)

English Patents of Inventions, Specifications, 1865, 3186 - 3265 (1866)

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What’s more, it’s not until very recently that people began treating stays and corsets as altogether different things. Gone with the Wind, the book? The terms corsets and stays are used interchangeably. The Oxford English dictionary? Describes stays as a sort of corset. The longest-lasting site dedicated to corsets on the internet calls itself the Long Island Staylace Association, with no indication that doing so represented an inaccuracy on its part. Sure, Elizabeth Swann should have properly said “You like pain? Try wearing stays”—at least it one wanted to be more accurate (if not good: good writing is partly about making oneself understood). But speaking here, and now, looking backwards? Very few people are trying to be that precise.

Additionally, it’s worth noting that corsets have had a variety of styles and features throughout history, and the term is by no means exclusive to what we most often see as corsets. The S-shaped corsets from the Edwardian era are very different from Victorian corsets, as are the more girdle-like garments that followed. While not everything is a corset, I’ve yet to see a convincing argument that the term isn’t broad enough to include 18th-century stays.

Tightlacing, Part 1: “Almost nobody did it”

Statements about tightlacing annoy me more than most, largely because they involve clearer instances of wrongness, but also because they hit closer to home.

Tightlacing has always been an imprecisely defined term: Lucy Williams, one of the best-known contemporary champions of corsetry, talks a little bit about the various ways the term has been used in her post “Waist Training vs Tight Lacing – what’s the difference?” found on her site. Usually, it refers to a quantitative measure—your corset must reduce X amount to be considered tightlacing—although recently, the discourse appears to have adopted a more qualitative definition, applicable to any instance where someone is shown displaying discomfort at being laced into corsets, regardless of how tightly they are (or aren’t) being cinched.

(Left: Moi, wearing a custom corset from The Bad Button Corsetry; Right, Upper: Scene from Bridgerton; Right, Lower: Scene from Enola Holmes)

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Take, for example, the scene that has most recently caused a stir, from Bridgerton, where the character Prudence Featherington is seen grimacing as she is laced into her corset stays corset, while her sisters wince in sympathy and their mother, Portia, insists that she be laced tighter. Others have raised objections to this scene, focusing mainly on the fact that Portia’s mania for a smaller waist is anachronistic and makes little sense given fashions that de-emphasize the waist, but fewer have noted that for all the hemming and hawing that is being done by the characters, Prudence’s figure is ultimately not all that compressed, and seems perfectly in line with everybody else’s. Is what is been done to her tightlacing? A lot of people appear to think so! And yet, that assertion carries some implications. If Prudence is being forced to tightlace here, is everyone else with a comparable silhouette (again, pretty much everyone) also tightlacing? The answer is kind of important, especially if one also wants to claim that tightlacing was rare.

It’s worth noting that Valerie Steele’s The Corset: A Cultural History, one of the seminal works on corsetry throughout history, doesn’t actually attempt to make a case for the rarity of tightlacing. What it does attempt is to determine the accuracy of claims that women regularly laced down to 18 inches, 16 inches, or even smaller measurements, which is not quite the same thing. When exploring the question by looking at collections of surviving corsets from the era, the book has this to say: "Statistics from the Symington Collection [...] indicate that out of 197 corsets, only one measured 18 inches. Another 11 (five per cent of the collection) were 19 inches. Most were 20 to 26 inches.” While Steele readily admits this is hardly conclusive evidence, she took it as a sign that women with 16-inch waists were nowhere near as common as accounts suggested they were. Case closed, asked and answered, no one tightlaced, right?

Well, no.

Again, it comes down to definitions. Even speaking quantitatively, very few people define tightlacing as “lacing down to nineteen inches or fewer” (certainly no woman in Bridgerton is that tightly laced). The consensus, rather, is that tightlacing is not about the size of the corseted waist, but about the size of the reduction. How much people cinched, however, cannot be determined by looking only at corsets, because doing so requires not only those corsets’ measurements (and even those don’t tell the whole story, given that they don’t necessarily indicate how tightly they were worn) but also the starting measurements of the people wearing them.

In other words, say someone with a 33-inch waist uses corsets to reduce their waist measurement to 25 inches. This, according to most definitions, would be considered tightlacing—a 24% reduction!—and yet the absolute measurements would be nothing to write home about. How is that reflected in Steele’s sample of corsets? Impossible to say. A 25-inch corset could also be worn by someone with a natural 27-inch waist.

What, then, can we say about the frequency of tightlacing? Well, if we’re talking about dramatic reductions of, say, more than four inches (a two-inch reduction, by the way, can look like this—again, more dramatic than what we see in Bridgerton) one can say, with a fair level of confidence, that it was probably not the norm. And yet, “not the norm” is itself a very broad category, and given the numbers involved, “a minority of people” can easily still be “loads and loads of people”, as seen, for example, with COVID-19. Even if two percent of the population who wore corsets tightlaced, that’s still hundreds of thousands of people—hardly “almost no one”, as some argue. And if wearing corsets as seen in Enola Holmes or Bridgerton counts as tightlacing, the number becomes even higher.

Tightlacing, Part 2: “Tightlacing is bad”

Perhaps not coincidentally, another element of the current corset discourse involves taking all the baggage usually assigned to corsetry in general and applying it to tightlacing instead. Corsets are not painful, goes the argument, but tightlacing is. Corsets are not unhealthy, but tightlacing is. People could do everyday things in corsets, they’ll say, but not when tightlaced. Arguments made against corsets in the 19th century were slander made by people who just hated women (another half-truth I have little time for), but are apparently utterly unobjectionable when applied to tightlacing. This, as many modern-day tightlacers will tell you, is bullshit, but it feels like an especially odd argument to make in light of everything else.

As in, what is the point? It feels a lot like saying “I’m not sex-negative, but having sex with more than X partners is icky.” And given the history-focused slant of the current discourse, it’s safe to believe that most people arguing against tightlacing are not people who have attempted it. There is, however, an existing community that will happily tell you, based on personal experience, what tightlacing is actually like.

So from personal experience: tightlacing may not be like wearing a bra, and there are definitely some considerations that you have to take while doing it— getting dressed, sitting down, and eating are all done differently when tightly laced—but this is more logistical than anything, and also applies to other things—running in steel-toed boots is much different from running in sneakers, and the advice when doing the former is often “don’t”. Additionally, the margin for error decreases the more tightly laced one is, but corsets aren’t special in that regard: proper care is much more important when one is flying a commercial jet than when one is flying a one-seater. But yes, you can do physical activity while tightlaced. Not necessarily the sort that you could do in exercise clothes, but then, the fact that suits are not optimized for running doesn’t make suits bad.

Tightlacing, in the end, is not really different from wearing a corset. Some people will like it, some will not, but ultimately, how pleasurable or how unpleasurable it is (it’s very pleasurable, in my book) depends on what you put into it, and that’s something quite a few people—not a majority, but also not “almost nobody”—who are often far more tightly laced than people in movies, would attest to, if people listened.

#Corset #Historical Fashion #Bridgerton #Enola Holmes #Tightlacing #Stays

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mysewingadventures · 4 years

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Little update on my corset making! (And busting some corset myths!)

Let’s pick up where we left off - I made the waist band/piece shorter and then I had to make a new mock-up as the old one was simply too small and adding a strip of fabric wasn’t really an option since it would’ve changed the shape of the original corset to the point where the waist line doesn’t really feel like the waist line with two different seams - I’m sure you get me. So anyways I made this beauty:

sorry once again for the bad lighting - I’ll work on that. I set the mannequin to my exact measurments and I’m so pleased with the result! You can totally already see the hourglass shape that it will give your body. The floppy side pieces are there for the padding. They’ll be padded, so the hourglass shape is even more highlighted.

A big misconception with Victorian corsets is that they would tightlace those things until they had a tiny little waist and they couldn’t breathe, but that’s not entirely true. While it is true that tightlacing did exist, it was very rarely practiced and pretty much as frowned upon as it is nowadays. People tended to be a little shorter than today’s average, and because of malnourishment, a lot of people were in fact skinny. But that doesn’t mean that a waist of 55 cm or 21 and a half inches was the norm.

What you see in museums are extent garments. Garments which were usually too small to be passed down, or for special ocasions, or just never worn because they weren’t a standard size. Back then, clothing would be worn until it quite literally fell apart, so it’s no wonder that those that survived all those years aren’t exactly something that would fit you. They probably didn’t fit anyone back then, either.

Now comes the padding. Victorians knew very well what they were doing and how to achieve those amazing shapes without their bodies actually being shaped that way. Believe me (and your common sense), not nearly every Victorian women had a perfect full bust and hips with a tiny little waist. They used padding to enhance the fuller parts and to trick the eye into thinking their waist was smaller. Makes a lot of sense, actually: The bigger your bust and your hips are in comparison to your waist, the smaller your waist looks. So a little padding in the right places can go a long way!

Back to my corset, though. I wanted to have a little bit of room in the back to tie it tighter or looser, so I left a gap of 5 cm (2 in).

I also kept in mind that a mannequin is hard and I can’t exactly change its shape, and while it does have my measurments it’s still going to be different than on an actual person. But I’m feeling confident about it. Now all I can do is wait until fabric stores open back up and quarantine is over!

#corset #victorian corset #corset making #historical clothing #fashion #victorian fashion #victorian #sewing #mysewingadventures #history of fashion

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