Corsets were originally quilted waistcoats, worn by French women as an alternative to stiff corsets. They were only quilted linen, laced in the front, and un-boned. This garment was meant to be worn on informal occasions, while stays were worn for court dress. In the 1790s, stays fell out of fashion. This development coincided with the French Revolution, and the adoption of neoclassical styles of dress. Interestingly, it was the men, Dandies, who began to wear corsets. The fashion persisted thorough the 1840s, though after 1850 men who wore corsets claimed they needed them for “back pain”.The corset has been erroneously attributed to Catherine de’ Medici, wife of King Henry II of France. She enforced a ban on thick waists at court attendance during the 1550s. For nearly 350 years, women’s primary means of support was the corset, with laces and stays made of whalebone or metal.
The corset has undergone many changes. The corset was originally known as stays in the early 16th century. It was a simple bodice with tabs at the waist, stiffened by horn, buckram, and whalebone. The center front was further reinforced by a busk made of ivory, wood, or metal. It was most often laced from the back, and was, at first, a garment reserved for the aristocracy.
Stays took a different form in the 18th century, whalebone began to be used more, and there was more boning used in the garment. The shape of the stays changed as well. The stays were low and wide in the front, while in the back they could reach as high as the upper shoulder. Stays could be strapless or use shoulder straps. The straps of the stays were attached in the back and tied at the front sides.
The purpose of 18th century stays was to support the bust, confer the fashionable conical shape while drawing the shoulders back. At this time, the eyelets were reinforced with stitches, and were not placed across from one another, but staggered. This allowed the stays to be spiral laced. One end of the stay lace is inserted and knotted in the bottom eyelet, the other end is wound through the stays’ eyelets and tightened on the top. Tight-lacing was not common in this time period, and indulged in only by the very fashionable. Stays were worn by women in all societal levels, from ladies of the court to street vendors.
At this time, there were two other variants of stays, jumps, which were looser stays with attached sleeves, like a jacket, and corsets.
Stays went away in the late 18th century, but the corset remained. Corsets in the early 19th century lengthened to the hip, the lower tabs replaced by gussets at the hip. Room was made for the bust in front with more gussets, and the back lowered. The shoulder straps disappeared in the 1840s for normal wear.
In the 1820s, fashion changed again, with the waistline lowered back to almost the natural position. Corsets began to be made with some padding and boning. Corsets began to be worn by all classes of society. Some women made their own, while others bought their corsets. Corsets were one of the first mass produced garments for women. Corsets began to be more heavily boned in the 1840s. By 1850, steel boning became popular.
With the advent of metal eyelets, tight lacing became possible. The position of the eyelets changed, they were now situated across from one another at the back. The front was now fastened with a metal busk in front. Corsets were mostly white. The corsets of the 1850s-1860s were shorter than the corsets of the 19th century through 1840s. This was because of a change in the silhouette of women’s fashion. The 1850s and 60s emphasized the hoopskirt. After the 1860s, when the hoop fell out of style, the corset became longer to mold the abdomen, exposed by the new lines of the princess or cuirass style.
During the Edwardian period, the straight front corset (also known as the S-Curve corset) was introduced. This corset was straight in front, with a pronounced curve at the back that forced the upper body forward, and the derrière out. This style was worn from 1900-1908.
The corset reached its longest length in the early 20th century. The longline corset at first reached from the bust down to the upper thigh. There was also a style of longline corset that started under the bust, and necessitated the wearing of a brassiere. This style was meant to complement the new silhouette. It was a boneless style, much closer to a modern girdle than the traditional corset. The longline style was abandoned during World War I.
The corset fell from fashion in the 1920s in Europe and North America, replaced by girdles and elastic brassieres, but survived as an article of costume. Originally an item of lingerie, the corset has become a popular item of outerwear in the fetish, BDSM and goth subcultures. In the fetish and BDSM literature, there is often much emphasis on tightlacing, and many corset makers cater to the fetish market.
Outside the fetish community, living history re-enactors and historic costume enthusiasts still wear corsets according to their original purpose, to give the proper shape to the figure when wearing historic fashions. In this case, the corset is underwear rather than outerwear. Skilled corset makers are available to make reproductions of historic corset shapes, or to design new styles.
There was a brief revival of the corset in the late 1940s and early 1950s, in the form of the waist cincher sometimes called a “waspie”. This was used to give the hourglass figure dictated by Christian Dior’s ‘New Look’. However, use of the waist cincher was restricted to haute couture, and most women continued to use girdles. This revival was brief, as the New Look gave way to a less dramatically-shaped silhouette.
Since the late 1980s, the corset has experienced periodic revivals, which have usually originated in haute couture and which have occasionally trickled through to mainstream fashion. These revivals focus on the corset as an item of outerwear rather than underwear. The strongest of these revivals was seen in the Autumn 2001 fashion collections and coincided with the release of the film Moulin Rouge!, the costumes for which featured many corsets as characteristic of the era. Another fashion movement which has renewed interest in the corset is the Steampunk culture, which utilizes late-Victorian fashion shapes in new ways.
Although often confused with a corset, the bustier is a separate style unto itself. The big difference is the cups for the breasts. Corsets only have bulges for the breast or are cut below the breast. A true corset will never have under wires, ever!
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We get this same question from women a lot. “What is the point of sexy lingerie? I mean it’s just going to end up on the floor in two seconds anyways.”
