CMU School of Drama


Tuesday, February 16, 2021

A Quick Guide to Our Victorian Corsets

Redthreaded: Like we mentioned in our article exploring the Victorian belly curve, corsetry throughout the second half of the 19th century emphasized a nipped waist with a rounded bust and hips, but there was a significant amount of variation over the span of 50 years. Fashions changed rapidly, and a typical corset from the 1850s did not look like a typical corset of the 1890s. There was a wide variety of styles and shapes in the period, with contemporary patents and advertisements often touting the last corset innovation.

4 comments:

Gabriela Fonseca Luna said...

Personally, I cannot design or build costumes or articles of clothing. However, I do have a great appreciation for it. Specifically, I love studying and looking for the accuracies and inaccuracies of period pieces. Reading the article gave me a more comprehensive insight into how corsets are supposed to look – at least how they are originally supposed to look. There are slight differences through the decades, but in the long run, they matter. This brings me back to “Little Women” (2019) and what I considered to be a failure. I understand they were jumping through decades, and at the same time wanted to stray away from what was historically accurate. But quite frankly, it just ended up being confusing. If you chose to be inaccurate that’s fine, but be consistent of. In designing you can’t pick and choose what you want to be accurate in, either do it or don’t do it.

Brynn Sklar said...

All of the images of the corsets in the article are beautiful. I know in the present day we have clothing trends that come and go by the year so it should not surprise me that corsets varied from 1860 to 1880, but it does. These two corset examples are so beautifully specific. Now that I know the difference between them, I feel like I will be looking for minute changes in the features of every corset I see. I have even seen corsets in general make a comeback in modern day alternative fashion. I have worn a corset before but nothing even close as artistic, detailed, or remotely time period accurate as these. The bodice I had was a cheap black one for a voodoo doll halloween costume, but now I am gonna be more conscious of corset types in general. It is super interesting and I want to know more!

Ariel Bernhard said...

I found this article to be interesting as there have recently been a corset trend again, especially after Bridgerton. People are romanticizing the regency attire and especially fashion corsets and corset tops. While they can be stylish in their modern interpretations, they were more notably painful and worn impossibly tight. I also think that corsets helped to shape unrealistic standards for the body. I love the dress in the image from Peterson’s Magazine and how this covers the different iterations of corsets, but the figure is sickeningly small. Disney women such as Ariel and Megara especially have impossible torsos and figures that set harmful expectations for all genders. I am not against corsets today, but I think they need to be a safe level of tightness and we need to have realistic expectations. No one should define beauty for anyone else or expect people to change their bodies. I support people deciding to wear corsets for themselves more than anyone else.

Unknown said...

I found this article a quite pleasant read. A corset is area.l’y one of the most crucial pieces in creating a period silhouettes. I have not made one myself but have studied how the different forms affect how a garment will appear. Al though most think that a forest was just used to suffocate women. Most corsets were not worn to the brink of constriction. They were really more used to help situated the body as to have it better prepared for the garment and also provide support for the clothing and bust. Red threaded is a great supplier to historical costumers and theatricals who find that labor of making a corset for every single period too intense. They have a excellent dedication to historical accuracy as they know their customers expect it.- Evan Riley