Long Corsets

 

 

Ultra-long corsets do exist and we have a few examples in the collection. They are often referred to as 'discipline corsets' and the story goes that they were used to discipline or train teenage girls' figures. Personally, I believe that such practices, if they ever existed, have not done so since Victorian times. The beautifully constructed brocade corset (left) and satin corset (right - Axfords 1971) have boning from armpit to knees. Nobody ever wore this device for fashion.

 

As an aside, both these corsets, although beautifully constructed, lack the day-to-day necessities of a fly underneath the lacing. Look how the poor woman on the left has her excess flesh squeezed into a painful vertical line.

 

 So where does form end and fetish begin? The examples on the left show long-leg corsets. One is a German device from the 1960's. This is, indeed, a surgical corset for stabilisation of the hips, whereas on the right, the confection from Romantasy could well have been inspired by the German corset, albeit three decades later. Mind you, if I had to wear such a corset, I would rather wear the one on the right!

   An Axfords corset from the early 1970's. Full length spiral boning was available then, but not latterly.

 

In this collage, kindly donated by Frangard, multiple lacings and suspenders abound. One might believe that this tortuous device belonged to some aging virago, determined to achieve a certain silhouette. Indeed, the multiple suspenders could support multiple layers of stockings, and for sure some elderly women used to wear two pairs as standard.

In reality this is a flight of the corsetiere's fancy, or perhaps corsetier's fancy for it has been said,

that only a man could wish to imprison a woman thus.

 

The extremely complex Jenyns on the left  with the laced brassiere and the other confections below might appear somewhat 'over the top', but I have visited an elderly friend of my mother-in-law who's daily ritual was to don such a combination of garments. She told me of another lady who wore a back-laced brassiere (Spirella offered this as an option until 1993!). Rather than attach her brassiere to the corset by hooks, she made her long-suffering maid physically lace the bottom two holes of the brassiere into the top two holes of her corset!

 

Two more examples of the genre are shown here. The first (left below) is a remarkable Jenyns confection that must have been made to special order (below left). The detail is amazing and the front and back measurements are 21 and 23½ inches. The corset is odd, since although furnished with sturdy suspenders, the front (the longest I have ever seen in an apparently conventional corset) could not have accommodated a woman's breasts and the hip spring is almost negligible. Was this a special order for a man, or an elderly, very tall woman? It weighs, with the four full length back steels, an astonishing two and a half pounds! I showed it to my husband's niece, who is a nurse, and she thought that it might have been for a woman. She reckoned that the corset was worn lower than we thought to stabilise the hips. She actually tried it on but even her rather small breasts were painfully squeezed and it didn't fit her younger female form at all. Certainly with the device tightened as far as she could tolerate, her spine was quite immobilised, but she could not sit down at all! She wore it for five minutes and was grateful to escape.

 

 

The other extreme example is made by Lady Grace (below) and is an outrageous 25 inches long in the back with an eight-buckle under-belt. I have also never encountered a seven-stud busk before. Sitting in this device certainly is not an option.