Корсет и его история: от stays до современной моды.

The history of the corset and stays

The corset is a supportive undergarment for women, dating, in Europe, back several centuries, evolving as fashion trends have changed and being known, depending on era and geography, as a pair of bodies, stays and corsets. The appearance of the garment represented a change from people wearing clothes to fit their bodies to changing the shape of their bodies to support and fit their fashionable clothing. A "pair of bodies" or stays, the supportive garments that predated corsets, first became popular in sixteenth century Europe, with the corset reaching the zenith of its popularity in the Victorian era. While the corset has typically been worn as an undergarment, it has occasionally been used as an outer garment; stays as outer garments can be seen in the national dress of many European countries. The term "stays" was frequently used in English circa 1600 until the early twentieth century, and was used interchangeably with corset in the Renaissance. The term "jumps," deriving from the French word jupe "short jacket," referred to stays without boning, which were less structured and typically laced in the front. Corsets have been used for centuries among the Circassians and Abkhaz tribes of the Caucasus region. They were used to "beautify" women and also to ensure modesty. Corsets were laced tightly with as many as fifty laces, and had to be worn from childhood until the wedding night. When the marriage was consummated, a groom had to slowly and carefully undo each lace to demonstrate self control.

For most of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries corsets were known, in English, as bodies or stays. These garments could be worn as under or outer wear. The women of the French court saw this corset as "indispensable to the beauty of the female figure." Early pairs of bodies were typically made out of layered fabrics like linen and silk, stiffened with starch, and stiffened with whalebone. A busk, typically made of wood, ivory, metal, or whalebone, was added to stiffen the front of the bodice. It was then carved and shaped into a thin knife shape and inserted into the Elizabethan bodice, then fastened and held into place by laces, so that the busk could be easily removed and replaced. This phrase continued to be referenced through the end of the 19th century, although the term "stays" largely fell out of fashion.

During and shortly following the French Revolution, rationalists and classicists criticized the glorification of an artificial body shape, created by stays, as more beautiful than the natural human form. Fashion trended towards loose, thin dresses which resembled the shift dresses worn as undergarments by previous generations. Doctors and philosophers promoted the beauty of the natural female waist, and criticized the effect of wearing stays on female health as well as the health of the fetus, when worn during gestation. By the 1770s, "short stays" became the fashion. Lightly boned stays were still worn for formal occasions, but it was acceptable to forego them, even at highly formal settings such as at the royal court.

The dress reform movement of the 1850s and 1860s opposed corsets and advocated against their use, particularly the high fashion trend of tightlacing to achieve ever smaller waistlines. While support for fashionable dress contested that corsets maintained an upright, ‘good figure’, as a necessary physical structure for moral and well ordered society, dress reformists contested that women’s fashions were not only physically detrimental but “the results of male conspiracy to make women subservient by cultivating them in slave psychology.” They believed a change in fashions could change the position of women, allowing for more social mobility, independence from men and marriage, the ability to work for wages, and better physical movement and comfort. Along with dress reformists, doctors began to criticize recent trends in corsets. Reformists claimed that lifelong corset wearing had a variety of health risks. Obstetricians of this period connected lifelong corset wearing to the difficult births that many Victorian women experienced. This public health outcry led to the development of the pregnancy corset by Roxey Ann Caplin, who consulted her husband, a physician and anatomist, to create more anatomically forgiving corsets for a variety of situations, including maternity. However, these garments were better known as girdles, and had the express purpose of reducing the hips in size.

A return to waist nipping corsets in 1939 caused a stir in fashion circles but World War II ended their return as women entered the workforce en masse and material shortages again became widespread, necessitating sleeker, more utilitarian designs.

In 1952, a corset known as 'The Merry Widow' was released by Warner's. Initially, the Merry Widow was a trademark of the famous Maidenform company, which designed it for Lana Turner's role in a 1952 movie of the same name. The Merry Widow differed from earlier corsets in that it separated the breasts, whereas corsets had held them together. Both corsets and girdles remained popular throughout the 1950s and 1960s, especially with the creation of Christian Dior's "New Look" in 1947. The "New Look" silhouette featured full skirts and nipped in waists which appealed to the nostalgia of post World War II America. The style contrasted sharply from the more utilitarian styles that had been needed during wartime, when women entered the workforce en masse and fashion houses faced widespread fabric shortages. The glamorous Dior designs symbolized a return to femininity under post war American prosperity.

By the 1960s, the advent of hippie culture and youth rebellion led the wasp waisted silhouette to fall out of favor. Feminist activists protested against the restrictive nature of Dior's designs. In 1968 at the feminist Miss America protest, protestors symbolically threw a number of feminine products into a "Freedom Trash Can." These included girdles and corsets, which were among items the protestors called "instruments of female torture". The 1960s and 1970s saw the rise of towards popular fitness culture, and diet, plastic surgery (modern liposuction was invented in the mid 1970s), and exercise became the preferred methods of achieving a thin waist. The sexual revolution of the 1960s and 70s brought with it midriff revealing styles like the crop top, and many women chose to forgo supportive undergarments like girdles or corsets, preferring a more athletic figure. The corset has largely fallen out of mainstream fashion since the 1920s in Europe and North America, replaced by girdles and elastic brassieres, but has survived as an article of costume. Originally an item of lingerie, the corset has become a popular item of outerwear in the fetish, BDSM, and Goth subcultures. In the fetish and BDSM literature, there is often much emphasis on tightlacing, and many corset makers cater to the fetish market. Women associated with the goth and punk subcultures experimented with corsets as outerwear, reclaiming the sexual symbolism and fetishistic, sadomasochistic associations of the garment.