There’s a scene in the recent film Corsage in which Vicky Krieps, playing the melancholy anorexic Empress Elisabeth of Austria, has a strop with her maid. As part of the arduous process of getting dressed, she must be encased in an impossibly small corset (the real Empress reportedly had a waist of 16 inches). Krieps snaps at the maid who cannot lace her tightly enough and demands someone else pull the strings to impose such waspish proportions.
Watching the scene, you’d be forgiven for thinking that such restrictive undergarments were normal for high-class women in the 18th and 19th centuries – and therefore expected for any female actor in a period drama. The myths of women swooning from lack of oxygen have taken on a whole history of their own.
Krieps described how her corset plunged her into ‘deep sadness’, while Simone Ashley – who played Kate Sharma in the second series of Bridgerton – said her costume stopped her from eating and moving. Emilia Schüle, who plays Marie Antoinette in a new PBS drama, said: ‘It was great preparation for the character because you really suffer.’ The corset, and the pain it is supposed to induce, have taken on a feminist angle.
Last week rumours spread of ‘safety concerns’ about the corset, with reports that they might be banned from Netflix and BBC dramas (since denied by both). Regardless, it’s clear that plenty of actors would prefer to keep their own underwear on. But there is a problem here. If the television corset really is as uncomfortable as the actors report, then the costume departments deserve to be fired. Far from being an excruciating, constrictive symbol of female repression, the corset has as nuanced a history as any other item of underwear.
The use of structured undergarments tocreate the illusion of a narrow waist can be traced back to long before whale-boned women in stiff Victorian gowns. In one 12th- century manuscript, there’s an illustration of a winged demon dressed as a woman, complete with laced ‘stays’ around his torso. By the Elizabethan period, women with slim waists and exaggerated breasts and hips are found in almost every portrait.
Despite the pursuit of a narrow waist, corsets were not meant to be uncomfortable. They would not have pinched or bruised the wearers’ ribs: they would have been custom-made and worn over a chemise to prevent rubbing. Nor was this fashion limited to women. There was an Elizabethan fascination with slim male silhouettes that continued up until the 18th century, with well-to-do men often wearing corsets, including dandies like Beau Brummell.
Ironically, the Regency period in which Bridgerton is notionally set was the most lax in terms of women’s undergarments. The neoclassical line of the ‘Empire’ dress had brought with it an abrupt change. Some women forwent corsets entirely, while others wore shorter undergarments that supported their breasts without cinching their waists.
Perhaps, in its emphasis on its actors being forced to show off preternaturally narrow waists and elevated breasts, the Bridgerton school of corsetry has more in common with Kardashian-esque Spanx than it does the early 19th century.
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