Hello, everyone, and thank you for listening to then again the podcast of the Northeast Georgia History Center. I am Marie Bartlett, the Director of the Ada may Ivester Education Center. Today I have with me Dr. Charity Armstead to talk about a topic I am personally very fascinated by the history of corsets. So thank you so much for being with us today.

I'm so excited to be here. Thank you so much.

Yeah. So could you tell us a little bit about yourself so our listeners can get to know you a bit better? Sure.

So I have a PhD in apparel, merchandising and design from Iowa State University. Before that, I got my master's in Historic and Cultural dress and Textiles from the University of Georgia. I live in the Atlanta area, have a cat named Howie, and Howie likes to help me sew. I've been doing historic costuming for about 20 years now and studying it with focuses on different areas for that whole time as well.

My cats also enjoy helping me sew. I think everyone needs a sewing supervisor that is little infuriate and super cute.

Oh, yeah. Whole Facebook group sewing with cats, so much fun.

Since you've done historical Costuming, you have had experience making corsets, wearing corsets. But for those of us or for those of our listeners who just don't know what corsets are, can you tell us what is a corset and what is its purpose?

All right, so corsets are a garment that is often misunderstood today. And I think we're going to get into that a little bit more in this podcast. But they were used to shape women's torsos into the fashionable silhouette of the period. It's a garment that usually laces up the back. And in the period that we're mostly going to be talking about today, 19th century, they would fasten up the front with it's called a busk. It's basically like little pegs with a loop that goes over it kind of similar to hooking up the front. People are often somewhat horrified by them today because it's like, oh, they had boning in them. This was so painful. So what corsets are you've got fabric, you've got lacing in the back, the front closure, and then they've got vertical bones. And those were made of different materials in different periods. This could range from at one point it was whale bone. It could be steel boning. And what it does have you ever noticed when you're wearing a garment that's really tight, you tend to get horizontal wrinkles in it? Basically, what the boning does is it's in these channels, we call them. It's like in little casings. And the vertical boning keeps the fitted garment from bunching up on you. It holds it with its structure. You might be familiar with this, having seen boning in strapless formal dresses, for instance.

Basically, we have built in corsets to dresses today, and people just don't think of it as a corset necessarily.

Yes.

And that also brings up a really good point that we're talking about courses that are mainly from the 19th century. So from about, let's say, 1830 to 1890, courses were popular all the way up until about 1920, when people started introducing the bra. So that's kind of the time frame, the 100 year span that we're going to be really focusing on, because before then there were corsets. But we really call them we refer to them as stays.

Exactly. And those, I'd say from at least the Elizabethan period through the first part of the 19th century. It's kind of interesting because in a lot of media portrayals and that kind of thing, they're shown as like, oh, this waste reduction thing, which really didn't come until much later. They functioned more just as a support for your bust and for the garments that you were going to wear on top of them to just give a little more structured shape. Not dissimilar to wearing a bra.

Today they were even called a pair of bodies because it's just like an outward, I guess, holding device for your body. But we could also go on to that all day, I'm sure. But today we are talking about those corsets that do have more of a shapely silhouette. So in general, can you tell us how those corsets were made in the 18 hundreds to have that very specific shape? Because they changed almost every decade.

Shaped. They did. So corsets in the 19th century they changed. So one thing is they changed a lot with the fashionable silhouette. The other important piece of this is that corsets came in a wide variety of styles, sizes and shapes to fit different body types. Think about the selection that you see if you go shopping for a bra. Today. We've got a very, very similar availability and range of styles all the way down to maternity corsets, which anecdotal evidence actually suggests from women who have tried on reproduction maternity corsets, that it sort of functions a bit like a belly band today when you're pregnant and can actually make things more comfortable through that support. So corsets are made with more or less boning and they're made with shaped panels of fabric to fit the body. Sometimes they have gores in them, which is basically like gore, a gusset, like a triangular piece of fabric that could be inserted at the hip or the bust to give a little bit more room, instead of just curving the lines of the fabric. So at each seam and then other areas in the corset, between seams, you'll have casings, or it's like a little tube where you slide in the bones to help, as I said earlier, keep the corset from crumpling up on you and give it some good structure. If they're fitted properly, they're really, really comfortable. Unfortunately, a lot of corsets now, because we have such fewer options since they're no longer worn every day. It's very, very difficult to get one that fits well. Custom corsetry is really a must, and so you'll end up with a lot of people who are on TV shows or movies and asked to wear corsets. They're like, oh, my gosh, this thing is so uncomfortable. It's like, well, honey, that doesn't fit you so well. It's just like if you're wearing a bra that's the wrong size or the wrong style and you're going to be miserable by the end of the day, you've got to take the time to get that really good fit or they're.

Being put on by people who might not know what they're doing, or they're tight lacing. Tight lacing being pulling the laces on the back of the corset too tight. Your corset is not supposed to meet at the back. It is supposed to have some room to it.

Yeah. Call it spring. Yeah. Generally you don't lace it all the way up. You want to have about two to four inches of gap in the back and you can kind of adjust it throughout the day as needed. So you've got some room there.

Can you tell us, how did corsets help ladies achieve the fashionable silhouette? So let's start in the 1830s. Corsets are kind of being in a transitional phase from the stays and the short stays of the 1810s to 1820s. That's kind of the first time we start to see like, a corset corset into the 1840s. So can you tell us a little bit about what that corset looked like and how it achieved the fashionable silhouette? And we'll go a little bit by decade.

Yeah. So one thing I kind of want to start with is that one really, really important functions of corsets, which you'll find out really quickly if you try to wear a reproduction, say, mid 19th century dress without a corset, is they help to support your skirts. Skirts were pretty heavy in this period. If you try to just wear the skirts directly on your waist without a corset, it's going to cut into your waist. You're going to be left with some pretty nasty marks. Ask me how I know. And so having that corset then, with the bones, distributes the weight of your skirts throughout your entire torso so that it's more comfortable to wear. So this was one thing that made them really important for the fashionable silhouete, is supporting the skirts. The other thing that it does is controls your bust shape and bust placement. So one thing that can become a challenge if you're doing an exhibit with historical clothing is when you try to put a 19th century garment on a modern mannequin, the bust on the mannequin is much too low. Corsets provided really excellent bust support and provided it at different levels at different times. If you think about the stays of the early part of the 19th century, they really pushed the bust very, very high. So picture like, what you've seen in a Jane Austen movie, for instance, later they pushed them up less, but still with it was still more than the support that we get with bras today. So often, if you're mounting a historical exhibit, you'll have to either use specialized forms or smaller forms and pad them out and change your bust placement to fit the garment.

I have just recently made Regency long stays that were essentially the pattern said that they would have fit the period from 18 five to 1830. And I, for the longest time, with my Regency costumes, thought like, oh, literally, it looks like a bra, like the short stays. So I can just get away with wearing a normal modern bra with it. And I hated my silhouette and Regency era clothes because I was like, it doesn't look right, and I don't know why. And then it's like, Well, I made the stays and tried it on with the stays. And of course I'm like, Ah, now it looks right.

It makes such a huge difference. I actually did a study a few years ago on how the body changes with different types of shapewear. And so I borrowed some from the theater department at Burnau. I had some from my own collection that I had made at different times and some vintage pieces from, like, the mid 20th century. And we participated in a body scanning study. And so I had the opportunity to get my body 3D scanned, wearing all of these different garments, and looked at, for instance, the differences in my waist measurement, bust measurement, all of those. I did a modern bra. I did a couple of 1950s and 1960s bras and long line bras. I had a pair of late 18th century reproduction stays. I believe I had some Regency yes, I had a Regency long stays, and then I had a couple of mid to late 19th century courses. Reproduction, mind you, you should never try to wear an original. It will destroy them quickly and they're so dang hard to get. So if you have an original, don't wear it. Don't try this at home.

Please don't.

But the differences in my shape, both visual and then also the measurements, because the 3D body scanner also got measurements, I ended up with a ten inch difference in my bust depending on which garments I was wearing. The smallest measurement, I believe, was with the 18th century stays, and then the largest measurement was actually with a 1950s bullet bra boostier. So there was a huge difference in the bust. Everybody thinks about corsets in the waist. Nobody thinks about the bust in my waist. I think I only had maybe a two, three inch difference, depending on what I was wearing. I'm off topic and I'm sorry.

Incredibly interesting study and also shows how a lot of times, I think in the 1830s and 1840s, even up into the 1850s a bit, depending on about 1855, before we have the invention of the Hoop and everything. Really. Corsets were just they were still acting like in the 18th and 17th and even into the 16th century is they were just support garments. They really did nothing to the waist that much at all. In terms of, like, waste reduction, it was about there there's a lot of differences in the bus support, but also in the lengthening of the torso. As we get into 1840s, where it's just so long, it kind of helps smooth everything out. But then when we get into the late 1850s and into the 1860s, I think that's when people, when they think of a corset, they think of an 1860s to 1890s corset.

It's really true. And I think Gone with the Wind contributed a lot to popular perception, which is kind of funny when you think about Gone with the Wind, it came out in, what, 1939? If you think about that, people were still wearing corsets. Some older ladies up well into the.

Even the grandma remembers leasing her grandma into a corset in the 40s.

So it's kind of fun because at that point, Gone with the Wind was almost like if we did a movie about, I don't know, the 1950s, it was that removal from that period. So you've got some of this, like, romanticization of the period and that kind of showed up in the costuming and how it was portrayed and perceived. But it also wasn't so far removed that there weren't people still living who had lived through this period.

And also, if you think about how we have a bunch of 1950s clothing today just kind of lying around in people's attics being sold at vintage fairs. Now, I have some pieces of 1950s clothing that sometimes I wear because I don't think of it as being that quote unquote old. Right? It's really not that old. So people in the 30s wearing their grandma's dress from the 1860s, it happened. You see that even in Gone with the Wind, people, especially background characters, because all of the main stars had their costumes designed, but background characters, they were wearing original pieces.

Getting back to your question about how shape changed, so what we see earlier part of the period, so early 19th century, 1810s, 1820s, we're seeing really high bust, really straight, tubular kind of silhouette. 1830s and 40s, it starts to become a little more shaped, and we start to see a little bit more of that kind of hourglass shape that we associate with the 19th century that really, I would say, came to a climax in the 1860s. Where you've got the krenolin is introduced in the late 1850s, I think.

1856. It was invented.

Excellent. Thank you. So we've got the introduction of the Krenolin and its popularization in the late 50s, early 60s, which brings skirts to new sizes, truly new widths that have.

Not been seen before.

Exactly, because before you'd have to have so many petticoats it would just weigh you down. And then in the 1860s, you also will see the shoulder seam starts to drop on the bodices. And what that does is it visually widens your shoulders. And then you've got your skirts wide at the bottom, and the waist looks very small by comparison. And this is something that we continue to see through the early 19 hundreds. A lot of it was trickery and optical illusion. You'll see evidence of photographs that have been retouched where to make women's waists look smaller than they actually were. This was super, super popular in the early 19 hundreds, especially. But you've also got a lot of padding that was added. Some women naturally have more of an hourglass shape and fit with a fashionable silhouette of the period. Others relied on different measures to achieve that. And that wasn't just the corset. It wasn't just about reducing the waist. It was all about proportion. And so you could have hip padding and bust padding. I've got a few friends who do period reenacting, and my shape is more hourglass, their shape is a little more rectangular, and they can only achieve these silhouettes with padding especially.

I think padding gets to its height in like, the 1890s, early 19 hundreds. When you get hundreds, for sure.

The.

Skirts get smaller, but the silhouettes proportions are still very huge. In the late 1890s or mid to late 1890s, you have those huge poofed sleeves, those very full skirts, and then you get to the early 19 hundreds, like 19 curves. Yes. And you get that S curve. So how is that S curve achieved?

So the S curve silhouette, which is also called the pigeon breast silhouette, if you want to kind of picture this in your mind, think about a pigeon. That was a really interesting achievement of corsetry. Ironically, those are some of the corsets that I think tend to be the most critiqued and vilified now. But a lot of corsets in that period were advertised as being healthier to wear. And I think that's one thing we'll need to talk about a little more is this idea that corsets have always been somewhat controversial, and we can get into that and kind of what made them that way, too. But if you look at the scurve silhouette, basically you've got a low kind of drooping bust line, you've got a small waist, and then you've got a curvy rear end. And so a lot of this was achieved with padding. Also. The corsets by this time no longer supported the bust. Some of them ended below the bust, actually, and you wanted that lower bust line even lower than we wear them with bras today. So you can kind of see how the shape it's not just about the waist, it's the entire body and what other garments you're pairing with the corset and then cutting the corset in different shapes to achieve that look. And then again in the eduardian period, even looking at editing photos to make it look more extreme in the photographs than it ever was in real life.

And then when you get past the S curve, when you think about think Titanic in that famous corset scene and I'm sure we'll talk about more corset scenes in a moment, but that corset scene, the corset doesn't even touch her bust, and it goes way down over her hip. And I think that's really interesting because it's a sleek, column like silhouette, which, again, it's not reducing the waist. It's more about creating a foundation for the garment to rest on.

And that's a really good point. And in that we can even kind of see almost a precursor of what we see in the 20s, which is a very, very straight silhouette, no curves, which a lot of women were not able to achieve. So we see that straight, thin silhouette in the shapewear came back. And you see a lot of girdles that really focus on slimming the hips in the 30s because it was all about still kind of a columnar silhouette, a little bit curvier than the 20s. But you still had a lot of these corsetry principles going on with girdles of that period. And that even carried through the 50s.

So we've been talking and dancing around. I think this subject a little bit of tight lacing, right? And that is the idea of pulling a corset so tight to, well, reduce your waist. Because there were some ladies who did it. I would say it was probably a minority of very wealthy ladies who tried to achieve a very small silhouette through corset tree starting in probably, like, 1860s, because it's almost physically impossible to reduce your waist with earlier corsets. But in all of these corset scenes that we see is usually about the person holds on to the bed post and then the other person pulls the laces really tight and they're like, oh, well, you need to suck in your stomach and get this very small waist. Probably the most famous is in Gone with the Wind. It's also in Titanic.

There was another really noteworthy scene in Pirates of the Caribbean which, ironically, I think was supposed to be set sort of in the late 18th century, where.

She has her corset like lace two times she faints. My favorite, though, for just El bridgerton. That's not my favorite, though. But in Bridgerton, even when they're trying to pull these long stays in the early 18 hundreds, that's like the first scene of bridgerton, which makes very little sense. The one that makes even less sense, though, is in Brave, the cartoon version of Brave from Disney. And Meredith is getting ready to go see all of her suitors. And this is set in medieval Scotland, and her mom is lacing her into a corset that looks like it's straight out of the Victorian era. And I'm very confused as to why that was a choice that was made. But I think it's because corsets and the tight lacing of these corsets have become almost more of a symbol of female oppression and that's why they're used in that sense. But they're a supportive garment that we've been talking about. So can you just tell us a little bit about all of that, that whole tight lacing, how they've become controversial, how they were controversial, what do we see corsets as and what are they really so corsets?

There were a lot of different views on it. Again, maybe a little less extreme, but thinking about different people's views on bras. Now, I do recall one scene in I believe it was Liza May Alcott's book, eight Cousins and the Rose's Guardian. Rose is the main character and her guardian, her uncle, is dead set against her wearing a corset. And her aunt is basically like, oh, my gosh, no, she needs to wear this to be an accepted member of society. Like, this is ridiculous. But the adults are having this argument over whether this young teenager should be wearing a corset or not. One thing I find kind of interesting is often you'll still see debates about corset on the Internet, at least in the corners of the Internet where I hang out. I don't know, maybe I'm atypical. But it's funny because there are some photographs from medical textbooks and pamphlets and propaganda even of the 19th century that are still circulating today, showing like, oh, this is what it did to your ribs and this is what it did to your organs. And the funny thing is, it's not really accurate. We're still propagating what was medical guess before we had actual documentation. So there was one study that somebody did a few years ago. You can find it on a blog, I think it was Lucy Corsetry. Might want to verify that later. And she had a corset made that was entirely plastic parts and had an MRI done while tight laced. And the findings of that MRI were really fascinating. Overall. The take home message was that even tight laced corsetry moves your organs in a similar way. If you're tight lacing that pregnancy does, the organs tend to shift in a similar fashion, which our bodies are capable of doing. So let's see. Let's look a little bit at this idea of tight lacing. One thing that I do think we should make sure to mention is this idea that then we've got an external garment that controls our shape and you're trying to achieve a fashionable silhouette, but you've kind of got external AIDS to help you. Today there is as much or arguably more pressure to achieve a fashionable silhouette, but one is expected to achieve that through diet, exercise, possibly even plastic surgery for a lot of people. And so we've shifted from an external garment that controls the shape to an internal control of women's bodies. Who can say which of those is better or worse myself. I'm kind of in favor of the external control if I have to pick one.

Also, I don't like the idea of surgery to begin with, but fashionable silhouettes change, and if you are doing permanent alteration to your body essentially through surgery, well, then you're just going to have to have another surgery to change that fashionable silhouette, which sounds horrifying to me at least.

So something I often ask my fashion history students, they'll look at something from history and say, oh, my gosh, that is so weird. I just can't believe people would wear that. I'm like, okay, what are you wearing now that people in 100 years are going to say, oh, my gosh, I can't believe they wore that? So it's kind of easy to turn this judgmental eye on dress practices of past periods while forgetting to look at ourselves. And it's important to think, in what ways do we hold the same mindset? In what ways could it be harmful and do some self analysis on the attitudes that we have about our bodies instead of just looking at the past and being like, oh, we've moved so far past that.

Can you say what tight lacing is? Because I'm not sure exactly defined it.

All right, so tight lacing was the idea at the point when we're looking at kind of waste minimization in corsets. So probably like 1850s through early 19 hundreds, the practice of tight lacing was basically we talked about having some gap in the back of your corset. It's pulling that corset tighter and achieving more waist compression than is necessarily normal or comfortable. This is something that was probably engaged in by a minority of women. It probably also depended on the occasion, the formality for which we're dressing. Think about what you'll go through to dress up for prom. You'll wear clothing. Yeah. Or your wedding. You'll wear a lot of more structured undergarments and kind of take a little bit more drastic appearance modification steps than you do if you're out working in your garden or going to work. So I think it was both person dependent and then also situationally dependent and interestingly. There are some magazines, the English Women's Domestic Magazine, that discuss tight lacing, which is where a lot of current information on tight lacing comes from. Those magazines. I'm not sure if everyone is sure of this. This might be something to check, these magazines. There's some indication that these were sort of almost like a fetish and it wasn't a normal practice for a woman to be able to lace their waist to 18 inches or 20 inches. Some women could achieve that, and I believe that was probably viewed as attractive by a subset of the population. And so you've got these letters written into the English Women's Domestic magazine talking about tight lacing. And it's easy to look at these letters as being sort of a norm of the period, which would almost be like looking at the tabloids as a norm of our period today. And so this is why it's really, really important when you're studying fashion history to evaluate your source. Who wrote it? Who was it written for? Why was it written? Is this representative of the population at large? And English Woman's domestic magazine probably not super reliable for information on tight lacing, but really interesting to look at for what it was, which was maybe this sort of idealization or even fetishization of tight lacing.

I would almost be, like, looking at the tabloid today and talking about Kim Kardashian and whatever she did and thinking that that was a general representation of everyday people.

That's an excellent analogy, because the Kardashians.

They do things that the regular population either does not have access to, has no care to do because of their lifestyle and just generally who they are.

So, yeah, it becomes really interesting that a lot of the sources that we use for fashion history, sort of they portray very small subsets of the population, sometimes don't completely portray reality. Thinking about photograph touch ups, drawings, illustrations. I remember I had a 1950s pattern that somebody had given me that I was going to sew, and I showed it to my grandmother. And my grandmother looks and goes, you can't wear that. Your waist isn't that small. I'm like, Nanny, this is a fashion illustration, and I fit the measurements on the back of this envelope, thank you very much. But we're looking at a 1950s idealization, which, incidentally, was another period of small waste. And what's actually in that pattern envelope is not the same as what is illustrated on the COVID So you've got to look at who is being advertised to who is being shown. Is it an illustration? Is it a photo that's been touched up? Is it a photo of someone who was photographed because they were atypical? Think about models today. And so looking at extant garments can be one way to learn about what was actually worn in the period. However, even that can have its pitfalls because of what I call survival bias. A lot of the smaller garments are the ones that survived. They fit fewer people. They maybe fit people when they were younger, and they couldn't wear them as they got older and waistlines expanded. And so we've got a lot of smaller garments surviving. And this is true all the way up to even vintage from the 90s. So we'll see a lot of smaller garments in historic collections. Now, that being said, Doris Langley Moore, probably in about the 1940s, 1950s, did a study on dresses in her collection from the 19th century to try to determine some of the truth of how tightly did women lace was the 18 inch waist that everybody talks about the norm. And what Ms. Langley Moore found was that the average waist size of the extant dresses that she examined was about 27 inches.

It.

May be a little more or less. I'm pretty sure it was about 27 inches as an average, which, although on the small side today, it's probably a size six or so, especially for a corseted body. And considering that the smaller garments survived, that's definitely not anything that's outside the realm of normalcy.

That was a very normal measurement. And especially if you think about how people were probably like a little shorter and smaller just because by a few inches, not by any drastic amount, but just by a little bit, just because they didn't have as good of nutrition or access to that type of things. That seems very plausible.

Another source that we can use to kind of maybe get a little better idea of people's proportions is looking at photographs of the period. Some Eduardian ones have been altered. You can usually see a little bit of a shadow at the waistline where that is the case. But looking at photographs of real people is a really valuable way to see the range of body types, body shapes, and the way people wore their clothes in a period.

We've talked a lot about different corsets and this whole idea of that tight lacing and why that probably isn't that was not the reality for a lot of everyday people, especially working women. But would working women wear corsets?

Yes, absolutely. It would be kind of like do working women wear bras today? Sometimes for some activities, maybe you've got undergarments that allow for more movement. Think about things like sports bras. So you might have stays that are a little more lightly boned, maybe not as close to the fashionable silhouete, but you still got to have something to keep those skirts up. And so, yes, women did wear corsets, did all kinds of things while wearing those corsets. And women who do corsets as part of reenacting today can tell you you can function just fine. It's all about making sure that it's well fitted and that it's not laced to extreme measures.

When you're wearing it, you want it to just feel like a little like a slight hug.

Exactly.

You don't want to be strangled because that's another thing that I just look at people and they're like, oh, my gosh, you're wearing a course. And I'm like, yes. And they're like, can you breathe? I'm like yes.

Aren't you so hot?

I'm like, well, it's a little warm outside. Are you hot? Like, you're sweating, too. Which is just like everyone gets a little warm sometimes and has nothing to do with my seven layers. Maybe a little bit, but also I might be cooler because I'm wearing natural fibers and you're wearing polyester.

Exactly. Polyester does not breathe.

Not at all. Not at all. People have this idea of they're like, oh, my gosh, are you okay? And it's like, yeah. I didn't strangle myself this morning. I didn't wake up and decide, you know what? I don't want to breathe, because guess what? I'm in charge of how tight that gets pulled, right? It's kind of like I use the analogy of, well, I didn't wake up and strangle myself with my bra today. I love it. I could well, it's physically possible, but who would do that?

A lot of it depends on the quality. I did some Civil War reenacting when I was in high school, and when I first started, I had what was basically a Bridal corset. And that thing was a nightmare, let me tell you. It was not the appropriate shape, first of all, say that from my now historian snob perspective. But it was made with too few bones, and they were inexpensive, flat steel bones, spring steel. And if I turned or moved, they would sometimes twist and buckle against my body, and I'd take it off. And yeah, I had marks after when I took that off. The next year, I made a corset myself to fit me, and I kind of kept making them and refining the fit. And the later ones that I did that were much better quality. They were fit to my body. It was like night and day. That cheap bridal corset oh, my gosh, it was a disaster. So, again, we're kind of back to this. It's got to be good quality, and it's really got to fit you well.

And also, people wear chimise or shifts under the corset, which helps kind of give it a little bit of padding. It helps you catch your sweat so you don't get your corset all sweaty. And that's, I think, a very vital part of making sure that corsets are comfortable is that you're wearing the thing that goes under the corset that provides that little bit of padding, that little bit of well, it provides that little bit of padding so you don't end up with those corsets imprinted onto your torso.

Yes, absolutely.

So why do you think corsets have gotten vilified or were vilified even as people were using them in common everyday practice and essentially continue to be vilified today?

This is a really interesting question with some complicated answers. One thing, if we wanted to boil it down, could be sexism. Oh, women are so dumb. They're wearing these things that are just terrible for their health. How could they wear such a thing? So the other thing that we've kind of got is the corsets kind of ended up being viewed as almost a symbol of female oppression, as I think you said earlier. And that gets really interesting if you look at the period when corsets widely fell out of use, the 1920s. If you read contemporaneous novels from the period, you can catch some of these attitudes in dialogue from the characters. I'm thinking about a couple of books, I think, by Lucy Mont Montgomery, who you probably know is the author of Annafarine Gables. She wrote a lot of other really fantastic books, and they provide some interesting windows into fashion of the period and attitudes that influenced fashion. And one thing that you see a lot in some of her books that she wrote in maybe the was this idea of oh, bless her heart, she's just so Victorian. I am, of course, giving a southern paraphrase of Canadian author. But there was this idea of, oh, these old stuffy Victorian attitudes and I think corsetry really became solidly identified with the Victorian attitude that was so out of style in the Eduardian and completely unthinkable in the 1920s. And so looking at that corsets became something to be discarded as a symbol of women's freedom and expanded opportunities. And did the corset actually hold women back? No. All the data for people wearing corsets now, and what we know women did then indicated that corsets didn't actually create that much restriction in and of themselves, but they became very tightly intertwined with this idea of the straight laced, which, by the way, isn't straight like a straight line, it's straight like straight and narrow, as in tight. So this whole idea of like the straight laced Victorian lady and just too prim and proper, the corset was sort of discarded as part of that attitude. So the attitudes influenced the fashion and in some ways vice versa. And so that's how the corset fell out of style and the mindset along with it. And we still see a lot of garments that function very, very similarly to the corset throughout the 20th century and even now. So if you think about something that's maybe accessible to some of our listeners is the idea of shapewear. In the 1950s there were a lot particularly for formal wear and you'll see this for sure if you look at the insides of a Dior couture gown, you might think about that. What was the new movie? Miss Harris goes to Paris. So there's a lot of boning, a lot of structure in those gowns dior pulled a lot of looks that kind of harkened back to the 19th century in a lot of ways. And so I've got several bustiers in my collection from the early sixty s that really look a lot like a corset just with a few elastic panels added and some actually did lace up just like a corset to achieve that silhouette. So kind of similarly when we swung into the 60s from the 50s, it was kind of similar to the shift kind of from the Eduardian period into the 20s where you see this oh, women are free, women are coming up in the world. We've got these more unfitted garments, they're not as curvy a silhouette. We've got this new modern look and it's kind of the same mindset. And so then underwear sort of follow the same trajectory. Again, shapewear in the 60s became much reduced and we start to see maybe lighter girdles, less boning. Incidentally, the ones with less boning, they roll up on you. So you can still get boned girdles and merry widows today. There are a few companies that make them. Rego is one that I really, really like. And what Katie did does some beautiful reproduction mid century shapewear. So you can still get some of these garments. They're more often used for special occasions, but a lot of women wear spanx, and so we're still seeing a lot of this shapewear. Think about bra. Underwires boning and bras. We've got vestiges of it still because it's what you need to stay comfortable and achieve the fashionable silhouette. And just like with a corset, if you've got a bra that's ill fitting and you've got an underwire that's not a good fit, it'll be painful. At the end of the day, you've got to make sure you've got that good fit.

So do you have any final thoughts about corsetry as we close out this podcast, dear?

No pressure or anything?

Oh, no. Just please summarize this entire.

Let me think about this. I think one thing that I would hope that people take away from this podcast would be looking critically at practices of the past, looking at them in context and applying those same lenses to your own patterns of behavior. Think about how society pushes you to change your shape. Is that something you want to do? Is that something society imposes on you? Is it some combination of the two? And when you're looking at a picture of your third great grandmother, don't think, oh, the poor darling, she had to wear this terrible corset. Instead, think about how her choices might have been very, very similar to yours and kind of being able to identify with the mindset of people historically instead of viewing them as unenlightened bumpkins. So that's one thing that I really want people to take from this is to be able to critically examine your own practices in terms of body image and shapewear. When you look at really fitted garments such as corsetry and boned garments from the 19th century is you can get a really good appreciation of how garment structure works and what kind of quality is possible in constructing a garment. So, for instance, if you're looking at, say, a strapless wedding dress, a lot of the ones made today aren't made to stay up really well. They've got to be anchored from the waist just like a corset. Too many places now will try to anchor them at the bust, which simply doesn't work because of the way our bodies move and squish. And so looking back, like Dior did at some earlier structural practices in clothing can improve the fit and structure of more structured clothing. Now I think I got the highlights.

Yeah. Thank you so much, everyone, for listening today. I hope you found that as enlightening and fascinating and fun as I did. This is an incredibly interesting topic that we could probably go on forever about. So we'll call it good for today though. So thank you so much, Dr. Armstead, for talking with us today. It was wonderful to get to chat with you. And again, thank you so much for listening. And until next time, take care.

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