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Video: Why did the ladies walk bent over in the lower back, and what was the danger of the "safe corset"
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
Some drawings and photographs of the past, depicting fashionable ladies, make one wonder: how could they walk with such a curvature of the back? And most importantly, what drove them? The answer is surprising: new, especially healthy corsets. And then they killed many women.
Where are we going to make the waist?
The question of how corsets affect women's health has been raised more than once since the eighteenth century. Why exactly from that period? Because, firstly, corsets have become tighter (in the days of d'Artagnan, sometimes even a pillow was placed under the front lower part of the corset - to look more appetizing, but in the days of Casanova, sophistication was expected from a lady). And secondly, there are much more doctors than before - which means there are also medical supervisions.
They fought with corsets with varying success. On their side was the opportunity to distinguish themselves from some laundress or a peasant woman, which during the triumph of the estate was more important than any other issue. Not only doctors, but also advocates of morality raised against the voice: after all, corsets were a common cause of miscarriages, and the female purpose, as it was believed, was not only to conceive, but also to give birth to a conceived child.
As the standards of femininity and beauty changed all the time, so did the harm caused by corsets - depending on how high or low the waist was made to them. If the waist was high in fashion, the stomach, liver, lower ribs suffered. If it is low, the intestines sank very strongly, displacing at the same time the female reproductive organs, and women walked with a very round, but exclusively below the navel, belly.
It became a little easier during the time of Natasha Rostova - the waist was not done at all, the corset only slightly held the female flesh within the bounds of decency and lifted the chest. But such a freedom for the ladies did not last long - it was too convenient for them, apparently, to live.
New safety corset
At the very end of the nineteenth century, lingerie manufacturers presented a novelty: a hygienic, absolutely safe corset. He no longer bent the lower ribs, did not constrict the stomach, did not pinch the lungs - the waist in it fell to the place where the ribs were no longer there, and besides, the corset expanded very quickly above the waist so as not to press on the chest. He also did not squeeze the insides forward and down - the flap in front, pressing on the stomach, made it look rather flat (but hardly completely - years of wearing corsets of other models could not but affect the female figure).
A captivating slimness of the waist, in addition, the new corset formed due to the deflection in the lower back. This deflection helped to simultaneously remove the stomach back and make the thinnest place of the figure in the corset even thinner by eye. For a greater effect of slenderness at the waist, the dresses were decorated in front in such a way that the ribcage and chest seemed lush and … hanging over the sunken (thanks to the corset) belly. At the same time, he made the bustles unnecessary - the buttocks protruded by themselves under the skirt.
Sellers and manufacturers vied with each other to paint the merits of the new model: the grace of a real lady, on the one hand, and the full work of internal organs, on the other. The last word in medicine and the beauty industry! Women all over the white world switched to new corsets very quickly. And even their next modification is not far from the original model, known as the "pigeon breast" - it has just begun to make the hips and the hips narrow to compensate for the effect of the swollen-looking chest. But it was the triumph of the new "safe" and "hygienic" corsets that marked the beginning of the end for corsets in general.
Thousands of crippled ladies
In those same years, one of the hardest jobs for women was considered the work of a laundress. One of the occupational diseases was damage to the spine - displacement of the vertebrae and the appearance of vertebral hernias - due to the fact that the washerwoman spent many hours standing in an inclined position. Injury to the spine at the lumbar level gave rise to many complications in the work of the internal organs of the lower abdomen.
New "safe" corsets gave grace to a woman's figure and a woman's gait precisely due to the fact that they forced the lady to hold the body down, strongly arching in the lower back so that the buttocks protruded noticeably. Moreover, there was no way to make the corset really support in this position. It was also impossible to give the back a rest in it - it did not give the opportunity to sit, leaning back, on the back of the chair. They sat in it, mostly leaning on one side - as often happened before with the bustles. The back didn't say thanks for that. The women of fashion were exhausted from back pain and from the side effects of shifted vertebrae. The doctors were again indignant at fashion.
Is it surprising that in 1908 Paul Poiret proposed to the ladies a new silhouette, which generally removes the issue of waist thickness, and the ladies pounced on him? Probably, the couturier was inspired by the calls of doctors to look again in the direction of antique fashion: to wear sandals instead of disfiguring shoes that strongly arch the feet in the instep, to wear straight, flowing clothes that do not restrict the body (of course, if you are not a laundress, you don’t rub in such clothes). Moreover, Poiret offered the first corsetless dresses back in 1905, but the public did not immediately taste them. Until the very First World War, when ladies even from noble families began to show labor activity (at least as sisters in hospitals), Poiret reigned with his peplum dresses and tunic dresses. True, there was no way to restore health to already crippled backs.
It's not just the shape of the corsets of the past that can be puzzling. Arsenic dresses, sharp collars and other fashionable tricks from the past, which today are injected into a stupor.
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