Corsets have taken a lot of hate over the past century. Modern movies and shows constantly portray this item of clothing as an inhibiting, painful device whose popularity was perpetuated by harmful patriarchal standards of beauty. The conventional wisdom is that corsets only exist to squeeze the waist to an unnaturally and unhealthily small size. We seem to have all concluded that the only sensible and feminist response is for our strong independent female protagonists to outright refuse to wear such a thing.

But as we are all likely aware, conventional wisdom is not always grounded in nuanced reality. Historical TV dramas are often inaccurate. So is this popular image of the corset grounded in reality? And how should you, as a hist fic author, handle their presence in your story?

But First, A Note on My Sources

Before we begin this fact-seeking venture, I need to establish who I am to speak on this matter and where I’m getting my information from. I’m a professional fiction editor and historical fashion enthusiast, but I’m not a fashion historian myself. My primary sources are from fashion historians, though. Specifically, from the YouTube channels of fashion historians Abby Cox, Nicole Rudolph, Karolina Żebrowska, and Bernadette Banner. These lovely ladies all create high quality, accessible, and just really fun content on fashion history and making your own historical garments.

My research into the true history of corsets mostly comes from these four sources. Any time I use other sources, I’ll hyperlink to them so you can easily check them out.

If you do know more than me and spot something that I’ve overgeneralized or just gotten wrong, please let me know! The world of information sharing would be so much better if we all just acknowledged our sources and were open to discussion.

But back to the topic at hand. Check out those four fashion historians yourself for a more detailed and thorough exploration of corset history. This video from Karolina Żebrowska is a great place to start. Here, I’ll give you an overview of the facts that hist fic authors should know about corsets.

How Corsets Work

Women’s corsets were undergarments popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that supported the back and the bust while also helping to create the decade’s fashionable silhouette.

Corsets were made of stiff fabric that either had whale bones or cording sewn in to help give the garment a firm yet flexible shape, as whale bone over time will actually form to the shape of your body like a good pair of leather shoes.

Now, that is a very general definition of a corset. The style and shape of a corset varied widely from decade to decade depending on the period’s fashions. Even within a specific period, there were many different types of corsets for women to choose from.

People also called corsets many different things over time. They’ve been referred to as jumps, stays, and corsets interchangeably. To make matters easier for historians, we now use the word stays to refer to the eighteenth-century styles and corsets to refer to the nineteenth-century styles.

I tried and couldn’t find stock images of earlier styles that I could use. So here are some pictures of late Victorian corsets:

You can check out this post for more images of stays and corsets through history.

Why Women Wore Corsets and Stays

Women wore corsets and stays for the same reason why we wear bras today. Just like with bras, the primary purpose of the corset was to support the bust. As you are probably already aware, many women find it more comfortable to wear clothes that provide some form of support to the bust. Bras didn’t really exist at the time. Corsets and stays were the garments that filled this need in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Women also wore corsets because they did something that our modern bras don’t do: they supported the back and distributed the weight of the bust and skirts evenly across the entire torso. Elastic wasn’t a thing yet, and wearing a corset made those big poofy dresses way more comfortable to wear.

A corset’s added back support can actual have some medical benefit. Bernadette Banner and Jessica Kellgren-Fozard have both shared their stories about how, as recommended by their doctors, they have used corsets and corset-like medical devices to help treat and manage their scoliosis. Worn in the right way and in the right situation, corsets can provide legitimately beneficial back support. Far from being torture devices, corsets can actually have legitimate and helpful uses that go beyond mere fashion.

But of course, corsets were still fashionable. Another key reason why women wore them was to help give them the fashionable silhouette.

How Corsets Created the Fashionable Silhouette

All clothing forms around the body in a specific shape. The shape that different styles of clothing create around the body is referred to as the silhouette. Here are some examples of different silhouettes from different eras:

Men’s fashion has largely relied on tailoring techniques to help give their clothing a flattering and fashionable shape. Traditional tailoring involves lining and manipulating the garment’s pieces with different types of stiff fabrics to help give the garment structure.

Without any structuring materials, clothing tends to look limp and can easily be unflattering. That added structure makes a garment look neater and sharper.

Throughout history, western women gave their clothing structure by adding stiffening materials, such as boning or cording, at a garment’s seams. Hence, the term seamstress. Clothing made in the style of a seamstress usually required the use of a structured undergarment (a.k.a. a corset) to create the feminine structured silhouette. However, since corsets are modern no go, modern high fashion dresses simply keep the stiffening materials within the garment itself.

The key here is that both tailors and seamstresses create flattering and fashionable silhouettes by manipulating the shape of the garment, not by manipulating the shape of the wearer’s actual body. Well-made garments have always been made to fit the wearer’s body to a T.

So when historians say that corsets gave women the fashionable silhouette, they are not talking about tightlacing. They are simply talking about how the clothing itself is shaped and how it sits on top of the wearer’s body. Just like in the long tradition of men’s tailoring, seamstresses were able to achieve a fashionable silhouette by the structure of the clothing alone.

And here is where we get to break some myths.

The Important Difference between Normal Corset Wear and Tightlacing

Most people assume that corsets inherently cinch up the waist to an unnaturally tight size. That is not true. You can tie your corset tighter than it was designed to be. You can intentionally wear a corset with a waist size that’s smaller than your own waist. But that is not what most corsets throughout history were designed to do or were intended for.

That practice of tightening a corset to a size smaller than your own body is called tightlacing. While some women in the past may have done it (just like some women still do it today), the practice has always been criticized and frowned upon by society at large. While corsets may have been the norm, tightlacing wasn’t.

In eras where the appearance of a small waist was fashionable, they achieved that look through illusion. They manipulated the fabric and padded the hips and bust to give the illusion that the waist is comparatively narrow.

This video from Bernadette Banner (particularly the last minute) excellently demonstrates how that illusion works and how you don’t even need to wear a corset to achieve it.

In short, saying that the primary purpose of a corset is to tighten the waist is like saying the primary purpose of a bra is to make your breasts look bigger. While push-up bras do exist, that assumption is really missing the point. It ignores how many different types of bras are out there and how most modern woman wear bras for comfort. The same could be said of historical women and corsets.

Where Did the Horror Stories Come From?

To answer this question, let’s go back and take a wider look at the history of the western textile industry.

The History of Women’s Roles in the Textile Industry

Throughout western history, the textile industry has often lain in the hands of craftswomen working from home. You can see evidence of that in our language itself. The term spinster originally meant “one who spins fibres into thread and yarn.” But it has now become a derogatory term that means “an unmarried woman, typically an older woman beyond the usual age for marriage.”

That one word carries so much layered history within it. It shows that there was a time when unmarried women could financially sustain themselves by working in the textile industry. It also shows how society at large viewed such women and valued their work, or rather, devalued it.

By the time the industrial revolution came around, the textile industry had gone from being in the hands of women to the hands of men. Textile creation went from something you could do at home with relatively simple and accessible equipment to something that had to be done in a factory with incredibly complex and expensive machines. Women often still worked in these factories, but the businesses themselves were primarily owned by men.

However, by the end of the nineteenth century, there was one area of the textile industry that women still dominated: the corset industry. Corsetry businesses were primarily women owned and primarily employed women. This was also the era of the suffragette movement, when women were fighting to gain their right to vote.

Where the Myths Started

Throughout these two centuries, there had been some concern that wearing corsets could be bad for women’s health. It was at this point though, when women were first starting to politically challenge the patriarchal structure of society, that the concern and misinformation around corsets really started to explode. Editorials started saying really outlandish and crazy things, like that corsets cause disease and literally cut women’s livers in half. Even though there wasn’t any concrete evidence to support these claims, they really captured society’s imagination.

That timing is not a coincidence. Politically motivated spread of misinformation existed in the past just as it does today. By spreading fears about the danger of corsets, men were able to take jabs at one of the only female-lead industries of the time right when women were starting to threatened men’s hold on power.

And that attack on this female-lead industry seems to have been effective. The seamstress’s art really hasn’t survived into modern day the way that the tailor’s art has.

How this History Affects Modern Fashion

We used to be able to rely on the shape of our garments to do the work for us. With the right clothes, any body type was able to achieve the fashionable silhouette. Now to achieve the fashionable silhouette, most women need to diet and fast and fight against their natural body shape.

Unstructured garments are cheaper to make. With the rise of fast fashion and the absence the seamstress’s craft, women’s fashion has changed from focusing on the garment’s structure to the body’s structure. I am one of many who do not appreciate this shift.

And bias against women’s fashion continues to exist. We still tend to view female fashion as vain and frivolous. Men’s tailoring, on the other hand, we view as an incredibly valuable craft and a symbol of true professionalism. That contrast is frustrating, to say the least.

How the Myths Continue

But what about all those actresses who have described wearing corsets for films as incredibly unpleasant? Surely they wouldn’t make this stuff up? And that’s right – they probably did have really uncomfortable experiences with corsets. That’s because it takes a lot of work to get a corset to fit you properly. Those movie productions may not have had time or budget to give these actresses corsets that fit them.

Corsetry is an incredibly complex craft. To get a corset to fit you properly, you need to have it custom made to your size. Then you need to go through multiple fitting sessions to ensure that everything fits the way it should. Remember how boning over time forms to the body? Once you’ve made the corset, you’ll then need to slowly break it in the way that you would slowly break in a pair of shoes. Finally, to be comfortable, corsets should be worn over an undershirt or some other layer of fabric.

Even if the production does get the fitting and dressing right, they may not have given the actresses time to gradually get used to wearing a corset. There’s a good chance the actresses went from never wearing a corset to wearing a corset for hours upon hours straight of hard work every day. While corsets can be very comfortable, they feel very different than bras and take some time to get used to. The incredibly high demands of a movie set is not the ideal environment for that transition.

So if the corset isn’t sized right or if you haven’t broken it in yet or if you aren’t wearing something underneath it or if you just aren’t used to it yet, a corset can be incredibly uncomfortable. But that experience doesn’t reflect how corsets were worn historically and how they are meant to be worn.

So How Should I Handle Corsets in My Fiction?

All this to say, I don’t like how we portray corsets in our stories as torture contraptions. It’s inaccurate revisionist history that feminists unwittingly support due to the historical pervasiveness of a misogynistic spread of misinformation. It’s also a trope that’s been overdone and that your readers will expect. If you actively go against the trope, that element of your plot will stand out. A lot.

That’s how genre tropes work. When you follow them, the plot point feels predictable and seamless. When you explicitly contradict them, the plot point will stick out as odd and therefore attention grabbing. Anything you do to portray corsets in your fiction will either work with or against that trope. If you just mention corsets in passing, the reader will likely bring the trope’s interpretive baggage into their reading. As a result, the trope could still flavour the reader’s experience even if you don’t intend to include it.

So if you care as much as I do about the historical accuracy of corsetry in storytelling, that leaves you with two options: don’t mention them or show how they actually worked.

Ignoring Corsets

I list ignoring corsets as a valid option because that’s actually what most writers of the time did. Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, L.M. Montgomery, Frances Hodgson Burnett – none of these women make a big deal about corsets or stays in their fiction, and all their books feature strong independent female leads. Those garments were such a normal staple of clothing that they weren’t worth mentioning.

When we talk about women’s clothing in modern fiction, we don’t mention that every woman is wearing a bra. We just assume that it’s there until we’re told otherwise.

If you don’t want this controversy to flavour your story, you can mimic the writers of the period. Just delegate underwear to irrelevant setting details that you don’t need to explicitly mention.

Now, if you do end up describing women’s historical undergarments in detail and conspicuously omit the stays or corset of the period, that’s problematic. But if clothing isn’t an important aspect of the story you want to tell, you don’t need to mention this stuff.

No matter how much I want corset tropes to change, everything in your book should be there to directly support the story itself. You should only actively contradict these tropes if that examination fits with and benefits the story you want to tell.

Incorporating Corsets

People who are into fashion history love engaging with stories that get this stuff right. One way to write really compelling historical fiction is to get specific with these kinds of nuanced world-building details. If you portray those details accurately, it will not only increase the uninformed reader’s immersion but also make the history buffs so happy. If you do want to include corsets in your story and add some really nice accurate historical details, I recommend you do your research.

Styles of corsets and stays often varied drastically from decade to decade, and there were many different styles within a period to fit different women’s budgets, needs, and preferences. Throughout history, women of all classes wore corsets and stays, and at various periods, some men wore corsets too.

As you do your research, keep in mind that you need to be specific to the decade, maybe even to the year. While it’s good to start with a general overview, don’t leave your research with general eighteenth century stays or nineteenth century corsets. Get specific with your year, place, and even your character’s social class to really pull out the delightfully immersive details.