In the 19th century, women of all classes were likely to be wearing some form of corset regularly, although not necessarily the painful, torturous design that popular culture has suggested. Over the centuries, corsets had evolved considerably to accommodate changes in fashion and technology. The editorial suggests that by 1895 public opinion had firmly shifted away from tight-lacing, but notes that there were still some extremes in taste: “Yet there are still some women to be seen who consider the compression of the vital organs no sin and who bind up their yielding ribs into such small compass that the waist measures only twenty or twenty-two inches.” So begins an 1895 editorial in the Toronto publication Ladies’ Journal, weighing in on an issue which had received considerable debate in Victorian Toronto: corsets and the associated practice of “tight-lacing,” wherein the corset’s stays are pulled exceptionally tight so as to narrow the waist. “It is a matter for rejoicing that fashion has at last decreed that a slender waist is not indispensable to a graceful figure.” Charles Pelham Mulvany, Toronto: Past and Present. The Crompton Corset Company on York Street.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |