The Corset: 400 Years From Pair of Bodys to Runway

For about four hundred years, from the late sixteenth century to the early twentieth, the corset was the foundation of fashionable women's dress in Europe and North America. It began as the "pair of bodys" of Elizabethan England, became "stays" in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and turned into the steel-boned, wasp-waisted corset of the Victorian era before girdles and bras replaced it in the 1910s and 1920s.

Elizabeth I's stays of 1603

The oldest surviving example is royal. When Elizabeth I died in 1603, her funeral effigy at Westminster Abbey was dressed in a pair of bodies. The effigy was remade in 1760, but the original corset survives, has been conserved, and is now shown separately in the Abbey's Queen's Diamond Jubilee Galleries.

A pair of bodys was a stiffened bodice. Reed or whalebone was sewn into channels, and a busk of wood, horn, whalebone, metal or ivory slid into a pocket down the front to hold the torso upright. It was usually laced at the back and at first was worn only by the aristocracy. The shape it made was a flat cone, with the bust pressed up and the waist barely marked.

Older versions of this page credited Catherine de Medici with bringing the corset to the French court. The story is repeated widely and not supported by the sources this museum checked, so it is gone.

Baleen and the busk

"Whalebone" was baleen, the springy plates from the mouths of baleen whales, and it was the favored boning through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Baleen busks appear in Elizabeth I's wardrobe accounts in the 1580s. The busk was also a love token: men carved and inscribed them as courtship gifts.

1827: the steel eyelet

The wasp waist was an engineering result. Stays of the eighteenth century had stitched eyelets set in a staggered line and were spiral-laced from a single cord. They smoothed and supported, but they could not be pulled hard without tearing. The metal eyelet, introduced in 1827, changed that. Eyelets could now sit opposite each other and take real strain, and with steel boning and a metal front busk, a woman could lace far tighter than before.

Tightlacing as a practice dates from the late 1820s and 1830s for that reason. Corset shapes then followed the dress: shorter under the crinolines of the 1850s and 1860s, longer and more rounded once the crinoline went and the cuirass bodice exposed the abdomen.

Measuring the Victorian waist

The famous numbers need care. Advertisements sold corsets in waist sizes from 15 to 23 inches (38 to 58 cm), and accounts of finishing schools describe girls laced down to 14 inches. The dress historian David Kunzle estimates that the average corseted waist of the 1880s was about 21 inches (53 cm), against an uncorseted waist of about 27 inches (69 cm). That is a reduction of about six inches, far from the extremes of the fashion plates.

Modern tests give a sense of the cost. Moderately laced corsets have been shown to cut lung capacity by 2 to 29 percent, 9 percent on average. Skeletal studies find lasting changes to ribs and spine, especially when corseting started in childhood. Reenactors report real discomfort beyond a reduction of about 3 inches, roughly 10 percent of the waist.

Reformers and doctors

The Rational Dress Society was founded in London in 1881. It protested "against the introduction of any fashion in dress that either deforms the figure, impedes the movements of the body, or in any way tends to injure the health," and named tightly fitting corsets first. In the United States, Amelia Bloomer had already promoted trousers under a short skirt in 1851, partly to shed the weight of corset and petticoats.

Reform changed the corset more than it ended it. Doctors began fitting and even designing corsets. In the 1890s the French physician Ines Gaches-Sarraute designed the straight-front corset to take pressure off the abdomen. In fashion houses it produced the S-curve silhouette, worn from about 1900 to 1908.

1917 and the 28,000 tons

Two things finished the corset as daily wear. In 1889 Herminie Cadolle had split it in two, with a corset for the waist and a strap-supported top half that by 1905 was sold as a bra. Then came the First World War. After the United States entered the war in 1917, the War Industries Board asked women to stop buying corsets so their steel could go to war production. The appeal is said to have saved about 28,000 tons of metal, enough for two battleships, though nobody has published the arithmetic.

By the 1920s the corset had largely disappeared from mainstream dress, replaced by elastic girdles and brassieres. It came back briefly as the waist cincher under Dior's New Look of 1947.

The corset as outerwear

The modern corset is worn on top. From the late 1980s Jean Paul Gaultier made conical corset bustiers to be seen, most famously the satin corsets Madonna wore on the Blond Ambition tour in 1990, and Vivienne Westwood built collections around eighteenth-century stays, some printed with Boucher paintings. Today's corset bra keeps the boning and the long line but rarely the lacing. The garment that once shaped every respectable waist now mostly shapes an outfit.

Last updated October 27, 2026

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