Guépiêrés

From Lord & Taylor - September 22, 1881

"WITH THE CONTINUANCE of basques, fitting with armor-like exactness, not only in the waist but over the hips, the extra fit of the corset should be a matter of the greatest care. A badly fitting corset destroys the effect of the most elegant toilet. Corsets are quite short and quite long to suit the fancy of the wearer. There is scarcely any more tendency to the return of elaborate bustles than last year. It is the custom of most well-dressed ladies to wear a small bustle, more to support their skirts than to add fullness to the bouffant drapery." [Lord & Taylor, Sept.22, 1881]

Corsets are also known as "stays... bodys... corps... girdles... belts... corslettes... guépiêrés... zones... cotes... but whatever its popular name, throughout the ages writers have censured it, doctors have damned it, cartoonists have mocked it, and fashion followers have revered it.

Can you possiby imagine wearing one of these cantankerous devices - bound at the waist...... AND - to be bound, having a foot stuck in the middle of your back by the one that is hefting on the laces to tighten you up!

"A woman's waist, left to itself, will grow larger and larger every year until it measures nearly or quite so much as the bust!" an 1888 fashion magazine declared. After generations of wearing corsets, Western women seemed to have little doubt that the contraption was a necessary part of life.

Nonetheless, Lady Mary Wortley Montague reported that women from other parts of the world hardly agreed with this conclusion. "One of the highest entertainments in Turkey is having you go to their baths," she wrote in the 1850s. "When I was first introduced to one, the lady of the house came to undress me - another high compliment they pay to strangers. After she slipped off my gown and saw my stays, she was very much struck by the sight of them and cried out to the ladies in the bath. 'Come hither, and see how cruelly the poor English ladies are used by their husbands. You need not boast, indeed, of the superior liberties allowed you when they lock you up thus in a box!'