I wholeheartedly agree that the comment you’re replying to was in poor taste (indeed, the reason why I left the comment I did was because I wanted to redirect the conversation to something more in-keeping with the spirit of the article (and because it personally irks me to see corsets reduced down to just being sexy, and the modern perception of corsets often ends up erasing or overwriting the historical richness of them)

However, I want to challenge your assertion that “a corset is just victorian scaffolding designed to make breathing optional.”. I have a few points of contention with this, and I hope that I don’t come across like an asshole in picking at this statement — I am writing this comment because this thread has made it clear that we are kindred spirits in terms of our passion for learning about material culture and history.

The idea of historic corsets being super uncomfortable and restrictive is largely misinformation, driven by how corsets function in a modern context. It’s not really a garment that works with fast fashion. For instance, here is a €100 corset, which I would consider to be extremely cheap. This kind of thing is what I’d reluctantly recommend if a friend wanted a corset that was a cheap as possible. This is quite shocking for many, because €100 for one garment is still pretty damn expensive, especially if that’s still what I’d consider to be cheap. But it’s simply not possible to make a corset cheaply (not even when produced by exploited workers in countries where labour is cheaper). Here’s an example of an actually decent corset from a corsetière and pattern maker respected by historical fashion enthusiasts. It’s $350, and that’s its heavily discounted clearance price (They don’t have any full price examples atm)

But the problem goes deeper than that. Modern corsets are often made using drastically different methods that produce a garment that is inherently uncomfortable. This applies even to extremely high end, or bespoke brands. Most corsets you’ll buy today are way heavier and more rigid than historic corsets, due to using more layers of fabric (fabric that’s often synthetic, and thus less breathable), and lots of steel boning (as opposed to synthetic whalebone, cane, or cording, which would be more historical).

Abby Cox is a fashion historian who has a great video analysing why modern corsets are so uncomfortable . She compares a variety of modern corsets to authentic Victorian corsets. I think this is a great example because it is true that Victorian corsets were more structured than corsets from previous eras. It really highlights how our modern perception of corsets is based on things that are fundamentally ahistorical. I also like this video because Abby is viscerally offended by some of the modern corsets, which captures my own feelings on this.

It’s also important to understand corsets in their historical context too, especially what function they provided. For example, bones corsets are super useful for helping distribute the load of many heavy skirts. That’s part of why I like to wear corsets — I have a belt thingy that I wear with an excessive number of pockets, pockets and tool loops on it, and that’s so heavy that it can be uncomfortable to wear without a corset underneath. It’s essential to understand that people wore corsets because they were comfortable. I’ve seen people complete obstacle courses while wearing corsets that appear super restrictive to the modern eye, but are actually well fitted, light and not restrictive of movement. The majority of people wearing corsets back then were people who needed to be able to do work (including manual labour) in them, and if corsets limited that, people wouldn’t have worn them.

Now, that isn’t to say that trends in fashion and patriarchal expectations of how a woman should dress isn’t part of the picture here — it 100% is, and that’s part of the historic context that’s important to understand. In a patriarchal society, it’s impossible to fully understand women’s fashion history without taking into account gendered expectations. However, even that is something that can be easily misunderstood from a modern eye in a manner that erases the agency of the historic women who wore these clothes.

Some of the silliest trends in women’s fashion history were heavily driven by women. People see images like this and often go "ones that make people go “look at how much more oppressive the patriarchal expectations on women were back then”, but that’s missing so much context. My favourite example to drive home this point is the farthingale skirt, which is a wide framed structure that is worn beneath skirts to give a hoop shape near the hips — the image I shared is an example of one. I really love the example of absurdly large farthingale skirts because, far from being a silly trend pushed upon women by patriarchal expectations, this was actually a thing that pissed off a lot of men of the time. Men were like “boo, the skirts that women are wearing these days are bad, because it’s so much harder to get close to them”. Women were like “oh, you don’t say? <Makes skirt even wider>”. When this pissed the men off even more, they just made them wider still. I’ve read some interesting academic articles that examine how farthingales were a means for women in the Elizabethan era to take up more space — both literally and figuratively. In a sense, the farthingale skirt was a form of feminist resistance.

And this kind of thing happens across eras — much of the modern misunderstandings about how restrictive Victorian corsets were is based on male-centred scaremongering that was like “look at those silly women with their tight corsets. They’re causing serious damage to their ability to be baby makers” (though often these claims of harm had no evidence to support them, but were propagated because loud and powerful men have a disproportionately large impact). Fashion history as an academic discourse is relatively new, in large part because it is only relatively recently that it was able to gain enough respect to be understood as a valid field of academic inquiry. Even now though, it still occupies a marginalised position in the discourse (much like the women who made and wore these clothes, and the many women within this field of study).

If you’ve read this far, then I earnestly thank you for your willingness to hear me out. Despite all I’ve written, I still feel like I’m only scratching the surface. To bring it back to your statement that “a corset is just victorian scaffolding designed to make breathing optional”, my TL;DR response is that this is a factually incorrect statement that I am challenging you on because this is the kind of misinformation that harms our modern understanding of the reality of historical corsets.

I apologise if that’s a bit blunt. I certainly don’t blame you for holding this incorrect belief — like I said, these kinds of myths are so prevalent that they affect even high end modern corsetry. I wrote all of this because I felt it to be a part of my ethical duty to correct you, but also, I wanted to do it in a manner that would be conducive to learning. We’re both coming into this conversation with different lived experiences and cultural contexts, so it’s inevitable that there are going to be blind spots where we either hold inaccurate beliefs, or lack knowledge about cultures that we aren’t already rooted in. For instance, I never knew about Jnanadanandini Devi before reading the linked post, and I’m grateful to you for giving me the opportunity to learn something that’s far beyond the small facet of fashion history I’ve had a chance to study.

I have more to say, but today I learned that Lemmy comments have a character limit. I will continue below.