Crinolines

Flatteners

Inanities

Long girdles

Sunday Best

Air hostesses

Victorian party

  

The dress that ended fashion. Jean Shrimpton at the 1966 Melbourne Cup

In the past the couturiers who set the fashions depended on the corset designers to shape the body to provide the correct foundation for the clothes they wished to design. So fashions and foundation garments were mutually interdependent, and the shape of foundation garments varied from the year to year in accordance with the prevailing fashionable line.

In this section we will look at some of the fashions of the past, and the foundation garments which made them possible.

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