The Corset: A Cultural History Review

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(More customer reviews)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.

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