Lace Me Up

It’s that time again to talk about things rarely mentioned.  This time we’re talking about underwear.  The concept of underwear has been around for a good while but what that underwear looked like has changed over time.  Specifically we are going to look at corsets.  Corsets are an important part of fashion history and we have a nice example from the Virgil and Thelma Linam Collection.

Corsets have been around for at least 500 years and there is some who say a form of the corset started back about 1700 BC and disappeared for a chunk of history (gallery.sjsu.edu).  Corsets have always served the same purpose throughout history:  conform the body into a certain shape.  Those shapes, however, have varied depending on the styles of the time.  Corsets were originally made of stiff material and fitted with rigid stays, hence the name “stays” as they were better known, made of whalebone or horn.  In their early days, in the 1500s, corsets were meant to give women a conical shape in their torso (deyoung.famsf.org).  The corset would therefore flatten the bust giving a straight-lined look down to a narrow waist.  The front of the corset would continue past the waist but the sides stopped at the hip.  In the 1700s tight-lacing became popular in England, while in France the waist of dresses was raised and if a corset was worn it was a short corset and more like the bras of today (deyoung.famsf.org).  In the 1800s the corset reappears.  Waistlines are back to their natural location and corsets came to support, rather than flatten the bust, creating the hourglass figure that we are accustomed to today (deyoung.famsf.org).  At the turn of the 20^th century, another new shape was introduced:  the S-bend shape (deyoung.famsf.org).  To achieve this look the corset holds the front of the torso straight while pushing the hips back, not a natural position, mind you.  By 1910, the desired look was a straight line from under the bust to below the middle thigh, but during World War I the corset fell out of favor as women entered the workforce (deyoung.famsf.org).

After WWI, the idea of the corset became more flexible with the introduction of elastic and they evolved into girdles.  Corsets made a slight comeback in the 1950s and then again in the 1980s, but overall, corsets are a specialized item now, usually reserved for theater or reenactments.  The corset from the Virgil and Thelma Linam Collection seems to be one from after the 1900s, creating more of a straight line than the s-bend.  To find out more about the early 1900s in Southeastern New Mexico stop by the Western Heritage Museum and Lea County Cowboy Hall of Fame and learn what life was like when New Mexico was just becoming a state.