Words Eloise Hallo
For centuries, women have been willed to stuff and rough themselves into constrictive garmentry. These constrictions, as not newly sauntered into public knowledge, align time and again with the nuances of female oppression belonging to their decade; namely, body ideals, and the expectations surrounding how a woman ought to behave, which has historically flittered just as freely. No better does this Venn self-illuminate than on the issue of corsetry, its physical and literal restriction, mirroring that of the Victorian women it arrayed in the limitations of their social movement. Us women have, as a group,however, become less adept at ‘behaving well’. As such, counter-cultural movements emerging in the centennial anniversary of the corset’s old mainstream, i.e. the punks of the 70’s, reconstituted the underwear as outerwear, demanding the notion that women and the female form be moved from the realm of the unseen.
In order to properly understand this, and other, comparatively recent shifts in our understanding of corsetry, we must first ruminate on its contentious past. The corset’s genesis, as far as we can be certain, starts in the early modern period, and from conception, so begins this contention, with the Florentine Queen of France, Catherine de’ Medici, imposing the wear of corsetry by a ban of ‘thick waists’ in her court. Despite this, corsetry of the period was not fashionably as restrictive as Madame de’ Medici may have hoped or, indeed, her comments make seem. Throughout its tenure, stays, as they were called then, would gain (and lose) straps – to support the bust – front-lacing – as an alternative for women without maids – and myriad differing boning techniques to facilitate the corset’s wearer. Spanning the 350 years of the corset’s reign, the garment was to change tantamount: its one common thread remaining, of course, firmly weaved into the shaping of the female form, yet notably, not quite so theatrically as we think today. In fact, it isn’t until the mid-19th century that we begin to see examples of the extreme corsetry we now associate with the history of the garment altogether. Even still, the monolithic notion of fainting Victorian women with 10-inch-wasp-waists is, perhaps disappointingly, myth. Areas surrounding the bodice would be padded – accentuating the illusion by further minimising the waist – and the avid fashion historians amongst us will know that increased fainting throughout the period had more to do with outbreaks of tuberculosis, as satirised in Puck magazine, Samuel D. Erhart’s cartoon entitled, The Trailing Skirt: Death Loves a Shining Mark, (1900).
Why then, as I have already done, does it remain resoundingly true to call corsets of the past ‘constrictive garments’? Hoping my reader will indulge this abstraction; it has more to do with the sentiment behind it, where shapewear more generally helps to upkeep the idea that we are always in some way aesthetically incorrect. Though corsetry, both new and old, remains physically limiting, its metaphoric constrictions far paled those literal ones in its pre-modern setting. Coupled with the belief that women of, and preceding, the Victorian era needn’t work or be educated, the corset resembled a kind of garnish in that its wearer was perceived as decoration. This helped form early intimations in the enduring notion that female body ideals are trends.
At the turning of the 20th century, however, young women became more cognisant to this problem and, as such, aligningly disenfranchised from the notion of being shaped altogether, both a silhouette, and fate lacking appeal, having become increasingly tied to that of their ‘frail’ and ‘delicate’ mothers and grandmothers, as Mary Brooks would state in her 1918 novel, The Secrets of Distinctive Dress. ‘Why?’ she asks, ‘because they wore ugly, tight corsets that gave no freedom’, no freedom, indeed, to exist outside of something ornamental, tightly bound and shaped into a mirage of male-gazed appeal.
And so, for around 50 years, the corset was thought to have died. Waist pinchers and control garments, ever subtly named, would emerge around the mid-20th century when the post-war mood rushed to re-establish the ‘respectability’ of women who had worked throughout it. The easy fix, it seems, was an hourglass figure; perpetuating that canon by which female bodies remain trended. The mood of the 70’s, however, was far changed. The coinciding births of several counter-cultural aesthetics – from the Hippies to the early Club Kids – challenged these pillars of respectability, which had wound firmly both fashion and social decorum alike for decades. From this fog of war, the Punks would appear armoured by underwear, notably corsetry, a characteristically rebellious rejection of middle-class sensibilities around censorship, and what was allowed to be ‘seen’ more widely. The punks had given the historic ‘stay’ a re-model, charging it with political intention by vanquishing it from the sphere of being hidden; reclaiming the ‘seen’ and, in so doing, the idea of being seen, heard, and all other privileges our foremothers had been kept from.
One could, of course, not talk about punks and corsetry without paying heed to their matriarch, the incredible Vivienne Westwood. Opening her first store, Let it Rock, in 1971, Westwood quickly established her brand as one for those on the outskirts and, by 1974, fetish-wear hung alongside leather, safety-pinned, and spiked couture, the likes of which remain typical to her fashion house. 13 years later, Westwood made it official, bringing the corset into the haute spotlight with her iconic ‘Harris Tweed’ Autumn/Winter Runway in 1987, the later renditions of which (pictured below) remain heralded as so culturally significant they are archived at the V&A today.
Of not dissimilar notoriety is the corsetry of Jean-Paul Gautier. His musing of Madonna for her Blond Ambition tour toyed with the absoluteness of femininity corsets had historically connoted. In costuming the garment underneath a characteristically ‘masculine’ suit (aptly ripped off to the soundtrack of ‘Express Yourself’), Gautier awares us to the redundancy of gendered fashions, and Madonna brings to the stage the same sensibilities around avenging the unjustly and uncaringly censored female form which had been bubbling in Punk communities for decades; the ‘seen’ corset was now wholly initiated.
Gautier’s subversion of gender through corsetry lingers, and is expounded, in its more contemporary conceptions. Charging forward to modern day – in the long history of corsetry’s re-emergence – the choice of designers, like Thom Browne and John Galliano, to put male-presenting models in corseted runway looks proves, at best, and hopes, at least, we’ve now done away entirely with the antiquated ideologies that surround the apparel.
Regardless, corsetry has found itself at the vanguard of self-distinction and expression, in a complete reversal of what the corseted body once meant. From costume to couture, the modern corset represents slipping into a decade of oppression from one of freedom, to be seen and shaped however we please. Female beauty ideals remain, and problematically so, entrenched by trend. Nonetheless, where reconstructing our bodies is concerned, the corset as outerwear must be noted its most autonomous option. No longer shrouded, hidden, or secret, corsetry’s unveiled revival tells us its wearer has something to flaunt; perhaps then we all deserve one of our own.