…The corset’s crippling effects on the female body were persistently ignored, much as today we ignore the consequences of wearing deforming shoes. The would-be guardian of our health, the physician, whose business it is to keep us in good working order, was as reluctant to interfere with fashion’s dictum then as he is today. Their warnings were sounded timidly, or at any rate ineffectively. They plied their trade oblivious of, or in tacit agreement with, the abuses of the day. As a man, as they were almost all male, they were hardly immune to the corset’s fascination; as a doctor he hesitated to condemn the corset for fear of being considered immoral. Respectful of manufacturers and their products, he did not permit himself much criticism. Occasionally, he was even known to pimp for them or, better, turn predatory and go into business himself.
Magnetic Corset. click image for source…
Thorstein Veblen: To apply this generalization to women’s dress, and put the matter in concrete terms: the high heel, the skirt, the impracticable bonnet, the corset, and the general disregard of the wearer’s comfort which is an obvious feature of all civilized women’s apparel, are…The vogue of the corset offers an apparent exception from the rule of which it has here been cited as an illustration. A closer examination, however, will show that this apparent exception is really a verification of the rule that the vogue of any given element or feature in dress rests on its utility as an evidence of pecuniary standing. It is well known that in the industrially more advanced communities the corset is employed only within certain fairly well defined social strata. The women of the poorer classes, especially of the rural population, do not habitually use it, except as a holiday luxury. Among these classes the women have to work hard, and it avails them little in the way of a pretense of leisure to so crucify the flesh in everyday life. The holiday use of the contrivance is due to imitation of a higher-class canon of decency. Upwards from this low level of indigence and manual labor, the corset was until within a generation or two nearly indispensable to a socially blameless standing for all women, including the wealthiest and most reputable. This rule held so long as there still was no large class of people wealthy enough to be above the imputation of any necessity for manual…
—English: The L. C. C. The London Corset Company. La Samothrace. EVERY CORSET MADE IN PARIS
Date 1908
Source from “MAGAZINES & JOURNALS FROM THE DATE STATED”—WIKI
To give an example, in the 1880′s a Dr. Scott put on the market an unbreakable elctric corset, guaranteed to cure quickly paralysis, and rheumatism, spinal complaints, dyspepsia,constipation, kidney troubles, nervous debility, numbness and so forth. “Constructed on scientific principles,” the advertisement assured the gullible woman, “their therapeutic value in unquestioned.” When worn constantly, even “nightly too if desired,” the corset also imparted to one’s system “the required amount of odic force which Nature’s law demands.”
ADDENDUM:
Veblen:If the word be used as a technical term, without any odious implication, it may be said that the corset persists in great measure through the period of snobbery — the interval of uncertainty and of transition from a lower to the upper levels of pecuniary culture. That is to say, in all countries which have inherited the corset it continues in use wherever and so long as it serves its purpose as an evidence of honorific leisure by arguing physical disability in the wearer. The same rule of course applies to other…
—is the electric corset which Dr. Scott has introduced, to the everlasting benefit of its fair wearers. These corsets are constructed on purely scientific principles, and while they are thoroughly charged with electro-magnetism, they impart no shock to the body, but rather a delightful sensation, rendering instant relief in many instances from the severe aches and pains to which all flesh is heir.—click image for source…
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