The birth of the modern corset tracks the rise of courtly manners in Europe. But the advent of metal eyelets in the 1820s and 30s, which allowed for tighter cinching, unleashed a social panic that led to the garment’s decline. From the late 1860s through the early 1890s, The Lancet published scores of articles decrying the corset’s effects on organ health, costal breathing, and rib structure. Moralizing fiction writers found a new cause. Guy de Maupassant’s short stories, for example, are full of attacks on women wearing deforming corsets: Madame Dufour of “A Country Excursion” can “hardly breathe”, her corset forcing “her superabundant bosom up to her double chin”, while the titular “Mother of Monsters” of 1883’s “La Mère aux monstres”, pregnant and bound in “a corset of her own invention, made of boards and cord”, “maimed the little unborn being, cramping it with that frightful corset”. Of course, there were real physical consequences to overtightening, especially for those forced into corsets before adulthood. Yet, as Valerie Steele has argued, some of the social reformers against the corset had alternative agendas, masking an attack on female self-expression as a public health initiative. “By simultaneously constructing an image of irreproachable propriety and one of blatant sexual allure”, writes Steele, “the corset allowed women to articulate sexual subjectivity in a socially acceptable way”.
First seen: 2025-07-14 20:00
Last seen: 2025-07-15 01:01