Victorian Corsetry

For almost the whole of Queen Victoria's reign (1837-1901), a woman's outer clothes were built over a corset. It wasn't an optional extra or something reserved for special occasions. Women of almost every class wore one daily, and dresses were cut to fit the corseted shape, not the body underneath. To understand Victorian dressmaking, you have to start with the corset.

A Victorian corset was a close-fitting garment from bust to hip, stiffened with boning and laced at the back. It smoothed the torso, supported the bust, narrowed the waist relative to the bust and hips, and provided a firm foundation that the closely fitted bodices of the period could be cut against without wrinkling.

How the shape changed

The corset changed considerably over sixty years, following the outer silhouette:

• 1840s. Long, fairly soft corsets, often shaped with gussets (triangular inserts) at the bust and hips rather than many seams, under bodices with a long, pointed front waist and sloping shoulders.
• 1850s-60s. Skirts grew enormously wide, first over layers of petticoats and then, from 1856, over the cage crinoline, a lightweight frame of steel hoops. Next to such wide skirts the waist looked small without extreme lacing, and corsets were relatively short.
• 1870s. Skirt volume moved to the back with the first bustle. Around the middle of the decade the long, tight cuirass bodice extended smoothly down over the hips, and corsets lengthened with it. The spoon busk, curved outward at the bottom, appeared to shape the stomach.
• 1880s. The second, larger bustle, and the most heavily boned, sharply shaped corsets of the century, many of them steam-moulded into a pronounced hourglass.
• 1890s. Huge sleeves at mid-decade and flared skirts made the waist look small again. Corsets stayed long and curvy, until in 1900 the straight-front corset began the Edwardian S-bend silhouette.

The technology behind them

Several inventions turned the corset from a handmade garment into a factory product:

• Metal eyelets, introduced in France in 1828, let corsets be laced much more tightly without tearing the fabric.
• Steel boning began replacing baleen ("whalebone") from around the 1830s, giving firmer, more consistent shaping at lower cost. See Boning.
• The split front busk, a pair of steel strips at the centre front that hook together with studs and loops, let a woman put on and take off her corset without unlacing it. It became standard during the middle of the century.
• Steam moulding, developed by Edwin Izod in 1868: the finished corset was starched, fitted over a heated metal form shaped like an idealised torso, and steamed until it set in that shape.
• The sewing machine and factory production made corsets affordable for working-class women, with different workers specialising in cutting, stitching, boning and finishing.

Myths and reality

The Victorian corset has a reputation built largely on its extremes. Tightlacing, deliberately reducing the waist dramatically, did exist and was hotly debated in letters to magazines and medical writing. Dress reformers, including Britain's Rational Dress Society, founded in 1881, campaigned against restrictive clothing on health grounds. But most women wore their corsets for support and shape at a moderate reduction, and worked, walked, rode and danced in them. Advertised waist sizes can mislead too: a corset's measurement didn't account for the lacing gap left open at the back.

The reformers' health arguments were also tangled up with the social debates of the era, about women's roles and physical fitness. Medical claims on both sides should be read in that context.

How a Victorian corset is constructed

• Fabric: coutil, a dense, firm herringbone or twill cotton that resists stretching, often in two layers. Fashionable corsets might have an outer layer of silk or satin.
• Shaping: either gussets (earlier in the period) or many shaped panels with curved seams, like a modern princess-line bodice.
• Boning: in channels stitched between the layers, often in pairs either side of each seam, plus extra bones on the diagonal across the stomach and under the bust. Many corsets had decorative flossing (embroidered stitches at the ends of the bones) that also kept the bones from shifting.
• Closures: the split busk at the front, and lacing through metal eyelets at the back.
• Finishing: top and bottom edges bound with bias tape. A chemise was worn underneath to protect the corset from the skin.

Sewing a reproduction

If you're making Victorian clothing, the corset comes first, before any measurements are taken for the dress:

1. Choose a corset pattern for the right decade. An 1860s corset under an 1880s gown won't give the right shape. Reproduction pattern companies offer corsets dated to specific decades.
2. Make a mockup in two layers of firm cotton or coutil, with cheap boning or zip ties basted in at the seams, and lace it on. Check the fit at the bust, waist, hips and the length at the front and sides, and look at the gap at the back.
3. Aim for a modest reduction. A waist reduction of a few inches is comfortable for all-day wear and gives the right shape, and a parallel lacing gap of about 2" (5 cm) at the back is normal. The shape comes from the corset's cut, not from tightness.
4. Use proper materials for the real thing: coutil, spiral and flat steel boning, a split busk, and metal grommets or hand-worked eyelets.
5. Take every measurement for the dress over the corset, and fit the bodice mockup over it. A Victorian bodice is closely fitted and often boned itself at the seams and darts. It sits against the corseted shape, and won't sit properly over an unstructured body.

The same principles, fitting a structured foundation first and then the garment over it, apply to any boned bodice. See Boning a Bodice.