History Of Corsets: How Corsets Became Popular And Were Then Rationed For WWI

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Modern Oddities by P. Pry Esq., Plate 1st: The Sleeves Curiously Cut, Ay There's the Villainy - vide Shakespeare, June 30, 1829. Artist William Heath. (Heritage Art/Heritage Images via Getty Images)

Beauty standards are infinitely mutable across time and geography, but a particular shape emerged as the ideal female body in the Western world hundreds of years ago, to the point that you probably don't need to be told what it is. The problem for women who strive to achieve this ideal is that, by its very nature, it's not attainable by most. What they could do, they figured out, was squish and mold their bodies into the desired form with some combination of fabric, strips of metal, and/or animal bones. Hey, nobody ever said beauty was pretty.

Bad To The Bones

Archaeologists have identified garments resembling metal corsets in artwork as early as the Minoan culture of the Bronze Age. Fast forward to the 15th and 16th centuries, and it was customary for women in the Western world to wear cloth bodices stiffened with a paste solution that laced in the front or back to keep things from jiggling. Later innovations relied on wooden planks, metal rods, or animal bones to hold the garment's shape, but that was exactly as uncomfortable as it sounds, so eventually, someone got the bright idea to use whale bones. They actually weren't bones at all but a type of stiff cartilage known as baleen found in the mouths of the whale species of the same name. It might not sound any more pleasant, but whale bone corsets were so popular that demand for them drove the species to near extinction.

The whales weren't the only ones hurting. As corset fashions became more and more extreme, women began suffering a range of maladies from shortness of breath due to constriction of the diaphragm to skeletal deformation. The skeletal remains of die-hard corset wearers of the 18th and 19th centuries feature ribs reshaped into an "S" formation and unnaturally curved spines. Doctors of the day recognized the damage and wrote books and articles warning of the "health plague" that they compared to gambling, drinking, and smoking. They were about as successful as they would be today if they tried to warn women off mascara.