page_title: Corset controversy
section_title: Corsets and fashion
hierarchical_section_title: Corset controversy / Corsets and fashion
caption_attribution_description: English: Duchess of Leinster (1864-1895). Ballgown of the late Victorian era
context_page_description: The corset controversy concerns supporters' and detractors' arguments for and against wearing a corset. The controversy was contemporary with the time that corsets were popular in society. Corsets, variously called a pair of bodys or stays, were worn by European women from the late 16th century onward, changing their form as fashions changed. In spite of radical change to fashion geographically and temporally, the corset or some derivative beneath an outer gown would shape the body or provide structure.
  There were brief periods in which corsetry was not part of mainstream fashion. In the 1790s, there was an abrupt change to fashion as the Empire silhouette became fashionable. During the following Regency era the highly supportive corsets of the early Georgian era were dismissed in favor of short garments worn primarily to support the breast and leave the waist and hips in their natural shape.
  Beginning in the mid-1820s, women's fashion returned to the full skirts of the prior century. In a repudiation of the Empire silhouette, the waist became the central focus of female dress. The corset assumed the dominant role it would hold for the rest of the 19th century.
context_section_description: The dominant aesthetic of the mid-nineteenth century called for full skirts. Prior to the common wearing of the crinoline, several petticoats would be worn in order to provide this fullness. A corset, used to constrict the waist and create slenderness, could also accentuate a full skirt through comparison.
  The Saint Paul Daily Globe wrote of corsetry:
  There is not a single fashionable woman who does not wear a corset. Some of the slender young debutantes affect the picturesque princess bodice, with the whalebones inserted in every seam.
  There were countless denunciations. Fashions that required a tiny waist were deemed oppressive. One such appeared in the Chicago Tribune
  THE SLAVES OF FASHION, through Long Centuries Women Have Obeyed Her Whims
  It is difficult to imagine a slavery more senseless, cruel or far-reaching in its injurious consequences than that imposed by fashion on civilized womanhood during the last generation.  ... the tight lacing required by the wasp waist has produced generations of invalids and bequeathed to posterity suffering that will not vanish for many decades. ... And in order to look stylish, thousands of women wear dress waist so tight that no free movement of the upper body is possible; indeed in numbers of instances, ladies are compelled to put their bonnets on before attempting the painful ordeal of getting into glove-fitting dress waists.
  Yet some women professed to enjoy the practice. A letter to the Boston Globe reads
  I myself have never felt any ill effects from nearly 30 years of the most severe tight lacing, nor have I yet found any authentic case of real harm being done by stays, even when laced to the utmost degree of tightness, both day and night.
  People who write against the practice of tight lacing are either those who have never been laced and have never take the trouble to inquire into the pros and cons of the subject, or those who have, perhaps been once lace up very tightly in badly made, ill-fitting stays with the settled determination of finding them most awful instruments of torture.
  Those who have been systematically laced up in proper stays from their childhood are the only ones who are capable of forming a right judgment on this subject and I hope you will allow tight lacers the opportunity of defending themselves against the enemies of trim little waist.
  A reader wrote to The Toronto Daily Mail insisting that only those who had experienced tight lacing could understand its pleasures
  I am glad that the subject of figure training is under consideration, because so much nonsense is talked on the subject of tight-lacing. The fun of it is, all the condemnation comes from those who don't wear stays, either from men or from women with hobbies and without waists. All who have tried tight-lacing speak approvingly of it. I would not give up my well-made, tight fitting stays for anything. The sensation of being laced in tight is an enjoyable one that only those who have experienced it can understand. I have been in corsets ever since I was eight years of age, and I am now past my teens, and though I am five feet four inches tall and broad in the shoulders, I only measure nineteen inches, and I am in capital health.
  The editor of the "Women's Chats" section of the West Australian advocated "tight lacing in moderation"
  I will always assert that corsets improve an indifferent figure and add to the beauty of a good one, and I will even admit that for a woman who aspires to look fashionable something might be said for tight lacing in moderation. The phrases sound rather contradictory, but readers of my own sex will know what I mean – a corset tight enough to grasp the figure, but not so tight as nearly to cut it in two.
  A corsetiere described how women might attain the desired waist size
  In our business, we constantly find women who want to have the waist made smaller and who are willing to endure anything in the world except hanging to get a little waist.  ... We measure the corset, pulling the measurements snug. And we tell the woman to wear it as tightly as she can comfortably do. T
caption: Fashionable dress, late 19th century
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