The Corset: A Cultural History (Paperback)

by Ms. Valerie Steele (Author) "THE CORSET IS PROBABLY THE MOST CONTROVERSIAL GARMENT in the entire history of fashion..." (more)
Key Phrases: corset advertisements, metal corsets, corset manufacturers, New York, Henri de Montaut, Liddell Hart (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
For 400 years, women wore corsets that controlled their shape and constricted, and sometimes crushed, their ribs and organs. In the 18th century, "tight-lacing" was a common phenomenon, but in the 19th century, technology allowed for more effective corsetry. Shortly after the turn of the 20th century, the corset became less popular and gradually faded almost completely from use, though recently, it's come back into fashion as sexy outerwear. In The Corset: A Cultural History, Valerie Steele, chief curator and acting director of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology and editor of Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, takes on an item of clothing that has achieved notoriety among many historians. But Steele challenges the popular view that corset-wearing women were merely the victims of fashion, and delves into the "complex gender politics surrounding the corset controversies of the past." The hundreds of color and b&w photos and illustrations provide entertaining visual evidence for Steele's scholarship.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

What is it about corsets that so fascinates costume historians and fetishists alike? For more than 500 years, women and occasionally men rigidly laced themselves up in whalebone or steel in order to be molded into some sort of physical ideal. Consider the work of contemporary designers such as Gaultier and Lacroix, and it becomes apparent that this strange obsession continues to this day. While there is no shortage of information on this fashion curiosity, Steele here emphasizes the aesthetic, social, and historical aspects. As chief curator of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York and the author of nearly 12 books on costume history, she is well qualified to tackle the subject and to attempt to answer "why." The text is scholarly, yet lively and readable, and the numerous images drawn from a variety of sources such as trade cards, paintings, advertisements, book illustrations, and contemporary photos help illustrate her point. This book would be a good purchase even for libraries that already have material on this subject. Margarete Gross, Chicago P.L.

Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press (February 8, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300099533
• ISBN-13: 978-0300099539
• Product Dimensions: 10.9 x 9.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #111,620 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

40 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Structure and meaning, December 10, 2001

By	Eileen Galen (USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Corset: A Cultural History (Hardcover)

Valerie Steele studied the history of the corset, "probably the most controversial garment in the history of fashion," for more than twenty years. This beautifully produced book consists of six compulsively readable chapters and hundreds of illustrations. I couldn't put it down.

In the first chapter "Steel and Whalebone: Fashioning the Aristocratic Body" Steele provides an overview of corseting. An "essential element of fashionable dress for over 400 years," the corset nonetheless was oftentimes condemned, perceived by historians and some contemporary thinkers as an 'instrument of torture,' an accessory to the sexual exploitation of women.

Steele has studied her subject deeply and widely, and so can confidently object to simplistic rejections of the practice of corseting, its heir tight-lacing (no waist is ever small enough, in the views of the women who practiced this), and other attempts at female self-modification, asserting that, in fact, it "was a situated practice that meant different things to different [women] at different times," and that "the corset also had many positive connotations - of social status, self-discipline, artistry, respectability, beauty, youth, and erotic allure."

The history, economics, and sociology of the Renaissance corset are discussed, along with the corset's unmistakable relationship to the earlier armor of Rome and the middle ages. (The Madonna, wearing a snug laced-bodice dress, one breast bared for her son, was painted by Jean Fouquet in the fifteenth century.) Men were not immune to their own versions of the corset. "A polished and disciplined mode of self-presentation was important for members of the elite," with physical self-control uppermost, but in 1588 Michel de Montaigne wrote of female deaths by corseting, describing the ultimately fatal voluntary modifications of the body that could take (and did) place. Steele points out that corseting was often condemned by the medical establishment, but that there is much more to the story. The corset's role in the erotic lives of men and women is undeniable.

Steele explores the medical controversies that raged around corseting and tight-lacing, the considerable medical and feminist controversies of both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, fashion history, theories of sexuality and politics, and their inevitable intersection. There is fitting and thrilling supporting evidence for a variety of ways to think about the corset, culled from literature, media, advertising, contemporary accounts, fashion history (Europe, the US, and Africa), studies in sexuality and psychology, along with examples of the corset in art (paintings of corseted women Manet, Degas, Seurat, Toulouse Lautrec are reproduced) The corset's historical and contemporary role in erotics, along with its use as fetish apparel (another area in which Steele is an expert) is thoroughly explored. Fashion photography of this century and Madonna, too. There is the eventual introduction of latex, the birth of the rubberized girdle of this century, and the ultimate demise all of these tight everyday things, except as openly sexualized accessories, curios, or ironic artifacts.

Finally, Steele discusses women's corseting of the past relative to contemporary ideals of female youthfulness and thinness, some women's enthusiasm for various aspects of self-discipline and alteration, "the hard body," along with dieting, exercise regimes that intend the sculpting of the female body, and elective surgical practices such as liposuction.

There are pages of endnotes, an amazing Bibliography, and a good index. Great book.

28 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fashionably Great, December 17, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: The Corset: A Cultural History (Hardcover)

Steele's book is well-researched, elegantly written, and, of course, fabulously illustrated. It's a great read for history buffs interested in Victorian manners as well as modern fashion-hounds who've noticed Britney Spears and Julia Stiles sporting updated corsets on the covers of Cosmopolitan and Rolling Stone magazines.

Chief curator at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York and author of several other scholarly books on fashion, Steele approaches the subject of body-sculpting lingerie with utmost seriousness. For this book, she teamed up with cardiologist Dr. Lynn Kutsche to investigate the damage wrought by tight-laced corsets on women from Renaissance courtiers to modern Hollywood icons. She clipped accounts of corset-induced casualties from Victorian medical journals and visited the Smithsonian Institute to view its collection of female skeletons with rib deformities. Though she eventually ruled out the idea that the Smithsonian skeletons were deformed by corsets, Steele did find that corsets were responsible for many milder health predicaments, including shallow breathing, shortness of breath, atrophied back muscles, and potential difficulty in labor.

Why did women persist in wearing these waist-cinchers for nearly four centuries? Steele doesn't pretend to fully unravel that mystery, but she tantalizes us with details about the origins of the corset and the rise in its popularity, especially during the Industrial Revolution, when mass-production first made fashion available to the middle-class households, and corsets were no longer soley the province of aristocratic ladies.

55 of 61 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Unrestricted History, January 4, 2002

By	R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Corset: A Cultural History (Hardcover)

Women, rejoice! You have given up your corsets, thrown off the painful cinches which restricted your natural form into a warped male ideal, and refused to comply with yet another imposition of male domination. Except... you haven't. We might think of the corset as being an outdated fashion accessory that has no place in the twenty-first century, but according to Valerie Steele in _The Corset: A Cultural History_ (Yale University Press), the corset is still here after hundreds of years. Her book is a large-format work with plenty of beautiful illustrations (not many that have a direct erotic appeal), but it is also a well-referenced text that gives a broad history of a controversial garment. It isn't just controversial now; a writer in 1731 wrote, "The Stay is part of modern dress that I have an invincible aversion to, as giving a stiffness to the whole frame, which is void of grace and an enemy of beauty." Steele reproduces many funny satirical pictures of tugs-of-war to get the stay cinched up tight (and everyone remembers Scarlett O'Hara's comic fight for a smaller-corseted waist in _Gone with the Wind_). Corsets were blamed for cancer, circulatory diseases, asthma, ugly children, and death. Probably corsets did not distort the body permanently; once undone, everything shifted back to natural positions. Corsets worn for workaday use were probably not very restrictive. It seems that, despite a wide belief to the contrary, fashionable "wasp waisters" did not have their lower ribs surgically removed; there is no written evidence of such a procedure, which would have to be performed without anesthesia and antibiotics.

Corsets have gone in and out of fashion in response to changes in styles, deliberate dress reform, and historical and economic forces. Steele shows that insisting that men were responsible for inflicting corsets on women is simply incorrect, and how the French Revolution, the industrial revolution, and both world wars affected corsetry. A rebound after the Second World War was cut short by the hippies and women's liberation. After that, Steele argues, we have had a run of exercise corsetry, shaping the body by aerobic exercise and weight training, an ideal that still holds sway. Surgical corsetry via liposuction continues the centuries of bringing women's bodies into agreement with the ideal of beauty, whatever that is.

Through all the centuries, corsets have had an erotic and a sadomasochistic pull. Corseting girls, and even boys, was a theme in literature having to do with their boarding schools, although it is doubtful that such corseted academies actually existed except in fevered imaginations. One can count on fashion designers to continue to include corsets on their most showy productions. Such lights as Madonna have taken advantage of the fetishistic potential of corsets, and they seem still to be desired under bridal gowns, reinforcing a sexual link. Steele has a dry sense of humor to enliven a sometimes academic text; she laments, "Admittedly, we know nothing about underwear in the premodern period," or puns "The English especially believed that a straitlaced woman was not loose," and she deadpans her research within a periodical titled _The Corset and Underwear Review_. One can look at the impressive illustrations she has gathered in this book (the often hilarious Victorian advertisements are the best) and see easily that men and women are going to have to change into entirely different creatures before they have corsets no more.