Putting the historical corrr into corset

Western Mail (Cardiff, Wales); 7/6/2004

The corset as we know it - incorporating whale bone, horn and buckram - goes back to the early 16th Century.

However, wall paintings from the third millennium BC reveal it has a much more ancient antecedent.

Females are shown wearing tight bodices that expose their breasts, while mosaics from ancient Rome and Pompeii feature women with cloth bound tightly around their chests.

Historical accounts are interspersed with eyebrow raising tales, such as the one from a manuscript from 1597 of a 14-year-old girl who was 'allegedly possessed by a devil, which caused her to shout out various sartorial demands, including one for a prestigious and luxurious pair of bodices.'

But while this may raise a smile, it seems corsets can kill. In Paris in 1581 one bride, 'being too bound and compressed in her wedding dress, came from the altar after having taken bread and wine in the accustomed manner, thinking to return to her place, and fell rigidly dead from suffocation. She was buried the same day in the same church.'

A few days later the groom married the woman who would have become his mother-in-law.

But the foolish bride should have known better. It appears health warnings are not a modern phenomenon.

John Bulwer's 1653 work Artificial Changeling refers to 'straight-lacing' as the cause of 'stinking breath' followed by 'consumptions and a withering rottennesse.'

These warnings were not enough to put women off squeezing themselves within an inch of their life, however. Women and children wore corsets and even overweight men such as Joseph Sedley in William Thackeray's Vanity Fair donned them.

The free-flowing Empire line was just a hiccup in the corset's hold over women and as waistlines dropped and Napoleon was forced into exile, it returned.

In the 19th Century - the age of seemingly high morals and respectability - Valerie Steele, author of The Corset: A Cultural History, suggests the garment and 'the act of lacing and unlacing it was treated as a symbol of sexual intercourse,' both in literature and in humorous prints.

One print 'depicts a husband puzzled because he tied his wife's corset laces with one type of knot, but found it tied another way that evening. The woman stares stonily into the distance, presumably hoping that he will be too stupid to realise that her lover must have unlaced and retied her corset during the day.'

As the 19th Century wore on, the wonders of mass production created such items as the corset that was 'absolutely unbreakable,' for just pounds 1. There were sports corsets and the electric corset, billed as 'a blessing to women,' that was claimed to cure rheumatism, indigestion and all manner of 'nervous affections.'

Warner's - still a renowned name in the underwear market - even produced a Rust-Proof Corset.

Women's emancipation is seen as the downfall of the corset. 'The fashionable figure is growing straighter and straighter,' reported Vogue in 1908. 'Less bust, less hips, more waist, and a wonderfully long, slender suppleness about the limbs.'

The corset had become an endangered species.

Not that it entirely disappeared. For just as the hourglass figure didn't suit everyone, neither did the straighter silhouette, and manufacturers turned to making elasticated girdles, hip-confiners and thigh-diminishers.

After the Second World War the corset made a brief return to fashion with Christian Dior's feminine New Look with its pinched-in waist.

Today women achieve the ideal body shape with cosmetic surgery and dieting and the corset's desirability lies not in the outline it creates, but in its visibility and the heaving bosom it creates.

It is the ultimate mantrap.

COPYRIGHT 2004 MGN Ltd.