The great corset comeback could RUIN your health

Sales are booming at M&S, but a historian warns ...

CUE a sharp intake of breath. The corset is back. Sales of the waist-whittlers are on the increase on the High Street, even at M&S. The proliferation of costume dramas, such as War And Peace, is partly to blame — even if the actress who played its heroine, Lily James, said she couldn’t wait to ditch the corsets she wore for period roles and slip into a tracksuit.

Waist training — where you wear tighter and tighter undergarments to cinch in your middle permanently — is now de rigueur among certain celebs who proudly tweet about it.

With big-bottomed stars such as kim kardashian setting a new trend, it was probably only ever a matter of time before the waist was whittled down to emphasise the contrast.

Even flat-as-a-board schoolgirls aren’t immune to corsets, as the disturbing new fashion for teens to compete on the sizes of their waists proves.

Just last week, Essex schoolgirl Tilly Green, 15, was in the news after her mum karen bought her one to ‘boost her confidence’. Worrying, the craze has since caught on at her school in Southend and the young girls compare how tight they can lace their corsets.

The corset has had many guises over the years, from the whalebone stays of the 16th century to the elasticated girdles of the Fifties and Spanx of today. Regardless of the engineering, the result will be the same for today’s woman as it was for a Victorian wife: purgatorial discomfort, which can pose serious dangers to your health.

As a historian, I know the dangers only too well. And I find it disturbingly fascinating that modern women are still willing to constrain their bodies using the same torturous method first conceived hundreds of years ago.

I was so interested in the effects that such restriction had on the body that, a couple of years ago, I took part in an experiment for a BBC documentary. Called Hidden killers Of The Victorian Home, it explored, among other things, the dangers of the corset.

And so, I ran up and down stairs wearing a corset, while wearing medical monitoring equipment to test its effect on my lung capacity.

I counsel anyone thinking of wearing one to see how I looked after such exertions. After a mere six minutes, I was close to fainting. And the results were startling. My lung capacity had been reduced by a staggering 25 per cent.

EVEN at rest, I had to take an extra ten breaths a minute. And I wasn’t even tightly laced in. What I realised was that the tales of Victorian women’s fainting spells were true. The poor things were fighting for breath.

Women tempted to go out and buy the modern- day versions of corsets should be aware of other worrying health concerns, too. Wearing a tight corset pushes the ribs in and up, and puts pressure on the internal organs. If worn from childhood, the ribs can be permanently deformed.

Regardless, women will undoubtedly keep wearing them. Why? Vanity. Quite simply, they make us look good. Scientists tell us that a waist-to-hip measurement ratio of 70 per cent is the most attractive, and corsets help women achieve that.

They also help us give a perfect posture, an appealing physical grace desired by everyone from Elizabeth I to Marilyn Monroe.

Indeed, Elizabeth I was perhaps the first ‘celebrity’ to embrace the corset. In the 16th century, whalebone, horn, and buckram — stiff cloth made from cotton — were added to women’s cloth bodices in the form of a rigid ‘busk’ inserted in a slot down the centre of the bodice. The corsets, also known as ‘ stays’, were thought to enhance physical selfcontrol and bestow civility.

For the next three centuries, corsets stayed with us. By the 17th century, it was usual for children — boys and girls — to be put in stays as soon as they could walk, to keep their posture erect.

In Samuel Richardson’s novel, Clarissa, of 1748, the protagonist visits a brothel and is astonished to see the prostitutes ‘ all in shocking dishabille and without stays’. Loose dress indicated loose morals. With the regency period, corsets dominated — and not just for women. Even the male dandies were strapped into stays.

The new 19th- century corset was laced up the back, with holes across from each other. Victorian women were literally strait-laced. The corset was also a triumph of Victorian engineering. The invention of metal eyelets in 1828 allowed the corset to be tied much more tightly (previously, thread-sewn eyelets had ripped).

And the steel front- busk fastening of 1830 allowed a woman without a lady’s maid to put on a corset herself: pain was democratised.

In the Symington Collection of corsets in Leicestershire, one from the 1880s is advertised as the Pretty Housemaid corset. For the sake of decency, every woman, whether nobility or in service, was expected to wear a corset.

THANKS to restrictive underwear, Edwardian women were manipulated into a S-bend that pushed the bust outwards and the bottom backwards. no matter how the corset progressed, it failed to become comfortable.

So how tight were they? In Gone With The Wind, Scarlett O’Hara is laced into her corset, and complains, ‘ Twenty inches! That’s what having babies does to your figure! See if you can’t make it 18½ or I can’t get into any of my dresses’.

Victorian doctors assumed a healthy woman’s waist to be about 28 in to 29 in. Of the 197 corsets in the Symington Collection, only one is 18 in.

A few women went further and practised ‘tight-lacing’. This was the habit of tightening the corset to 16 in or less. If it sounds distasteful, it was. Victorian magazines are full of fetishistic letters about tight-laced boarding schools that tell us more about sexual fantasies than any reality. But some people did and do do it. In the U.S. today, there is a woman called Cathie Jung who is famous for her 17in waist, produced by wearing a corset day and night (the look is an acquired taste: the flesh has to go somewhere). As we know, corsets didn’t fade away with the 19th century. Even the boyish Twenties look was not a fashion most women could achieve without some sort of corset (rubber ones were favoured).

By the late Thirties, the wasp waist was back in style and, although many of the materials to make corsets were requisitioned for the war effort, after the hostilities ended, the corset — and its new version, the girdle — was once again called on.

To be a la mode, the Fifties housewife needed a girdle (though, according to legendary socialite nancy Mitford, it was by then ‘U’, that is to say, upper-class, to say ‘stays’ and ‘non-U’ to say ‘corset’).

Today, for all the talk of equality, we’re just as enamoured of the corset. TV’s makeover king Gok Wan has been advocating corsetry for years, and that’s before we consider the corset-as-outerwear fashions of Jean Paul Gaultier, Alexander McQueen, Christian Lacroix and Vivienne Westwood.

And even if we’re not in corsets, we’re expected to conform to the small- waisted, big- bottomed, lifted- bust look through tyrannous diet and exercise regimes alone: what fashion historian Valerie Steele has called ‘the muscular corset’.

Stays, corsets, or not, women’s midriffs are still, in this feminist age, supposed to show our selfdiscipline and our sexual allure — whatever the cost.