Evolution of the corset

The girdle

The bra

Womens drawers

Children's Foundations

Famous brands

 

Sir Simon & Margaret Felbrygge 1416

Brass rubbing (negative), Felbrigg Church, Norfolk
 

It is most unlikely that the Felbrygges bore any resemblance to these portraits at the time of their death, but presumably their descendants wanted to show them as they would have looked in their prime. The illustrations may just have been wishful thinking, but these slim figures could not have been achieved without wearing corsets.

The first evidence of a garment resembling a modern corset comes from the Palace of Knossos, in Crete, where fragments of several clay figurines of women wearing garments remarkably like modern corsets were found during excavations.

After this the record is blank until about 1200 AD, when we get the first Western images suggesting that the people depicted were wearing some form of corsets. Until then Western clothing had consisted mainly of loose fitting robes, but in the 14th century the mediaeval craft guilds began to become more organised, and tailors started to learn how to cut fabrics to fit the human body.

The tailors increasing skills enabled them to make the waist more obvious, and human vanity ensured that they would soon start to think of ways to emphasise and modify it.

This ability to alter the shape of the body was really the start of fashion, and until recently fashions were distinguished primarily by changes in the way in which they distorted the shape of the body, and the waist in particular.

By about the 15th century corsets (then called bodys or stays) had become normal wear for women, and often for men, at least in the upper classes, and foundation garments, in one form or another, remained a normal (and almost compulsory) item of Western women's clothing until the latter part of the 20th century. In this section we will look at this history in more detail.

 

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