#I rambled wayyyy too much very sorry op

[1-800-dead-boy]

THANK GOD SOMEONE ELSE SAID IT

Okay so, relatively speaking, I am a complete amateur when it comes to historical fashion but in all honesty, you don’t NEED to be an expert in it to understand that what OP is saying is completely true.

Working women had been wearing something similar to corsets for hundreds of years before it evolved into what we know as corsets. They were called “stays” or “a pair of stays”.

From my pretty limited knowledge and fairly intense research, the original version of Stays were made of structured cloth that had straps that were adjustable using ribbons and laced in the front instead of the back. It was essentially a bra mixed with a back brace for women working in factories or domestic service. Even poor women had a pair.

Now, in my opinion, corsets aren’t too much different. While older iterations of Stays weren’t boned yet, (forgive my lack of dates it is very late at night and i am sleepy) I believe they were layered up with fabric to give them structure or treated in some way (im not as knowledgeable in stays as i would like to be so take this with a hefty dose of “this is an amateur fashion historian”).

Boning in Stays didn’t come until later, before that there was some kind of “plate” they would slip into it to act as support, and even then they used a method called Cording which was essentially layering two fabrics with you guessed it a cord in between to give structure and strength to it. When boned corsets became the norm is when you bring in whale-boned corsets and steel boned ones. (Keep in mind that heavily boned corsets we’re for the upper class as they didn’t really need the freedom that was required for working class women).

Now let’s talk about tight-lacing, for the most part, it wasn’t really a thing as OP stated. Like, yeah it happened but it wasn’t common place. Do y’all remember in Pirates of the Caribbean when Elizabeth fainted from her corset being wayyyy too tight? In my opinion, that’s makes sense for someone of her stature. It didn’t need to be strictly practical, so there is an element of “look at what I can afford to do”. That’s all that tight-lacing boils down to.

Moral of the story: corsets were simply back and bust support for a LARGE majority of women, they were not “torture devices” and every writer for period dramas that has ever written a scene like OP described is basically giving a huge “fuck you” to history.

Also I love Emma Watson a little less for what she said about the corset she tried to wear in Beauty and the Beast, like babe, that’s an issue with the costuming department. Actually, the entire Beauty and the Beast live-action and atrocious when it came to period accurate costumes, like her dress should be Fucking Massive for someone who’s supposed to be impersonating a member of the French Aristocracy but nooooo, it had to look like it came off the clearance rack of a David’s Bridal back in 2011 like dude I wouldn’t wear that shit to homecoming and you wore it as a “centerpiece” of the costumes????

Rant over, I’m sorry for the long post and the rambling. If I got anything wrong please correct me POLITELY i am fragile and just want to spread the good word.

You know my favorite bits in period dramas are the ones where the heroine is “not like other girls” and chooses not to wear a corset because let’s be real, no inteligent woman in a period drama setting would do that.

And then you can tell it was written by someone without a chest because next thing you know, they’ll be running off across a field or something.

Like girl, you just took off the only breast support you had, and now you’re sprinting across a field?? How is this not an issue??

And then they’re like “I’m a woman of science” but clearly no, because any woman who knows anything about weight distribution wouldn’t choose to fling off their corset whilst still wearing a poofy skirt. Like it’s there for a reason. It distributes the weight and keeps your 50 lbs of skirts from digging into your bare skin. And I cannot stress this strongly enough, IT SUPPORTS THE BUST. WHAT ARE YOU DOING. I’ll make an exception if they’re dressing as a man or have anything gender going on, but otherwise, WHAT ARE YOU DOING??

And then they say it’s because they’re painful or that they’re “instruments of the patriarchy”, except no they fucking weren’t, men wore corsets too, they were literally just bust support and historical corsets didn’t hurt, because they were made to fit your body, and they actually molded to fit it more the more you wore them. I know, I have multiple.

And if you think one couldn’t breathe, yes you could, people wore corset like garments for like 500 years, you think they would wear them if they couldn’t breathe? And no they didn’t lace them tightly except for special occasions and that was only a few people. In fact for most of history, it was physically impossible to lace boned garments any tighter then they were supposed to go because metal eyelets weren’t invented yet. You achieved the small waist look by padding out your hips and maybe your chest and sleeves creating an optical illusion