Opening Weekend!!!

This past weekend was the official opening of the Museum! I can't believe that the season is already here, although it feels like an eternity since the last one. I'm eyeing my pile of sewing yet-to-do very nervously, here, this is a very busy May for me and I know it's going to be some late nights getting all of my Needs done. 

Anyway, opening weekend we always have a fashion show! We bring out some of our best clothes here to show off in a representation of fashion from the time of the American Revolution to the sinking of the Titanic, and the public seems to enjoy it because we always get a good sized crowd coming considering all the other things going on at the same time elsewhere on the Museum grounds. My first year doing the fashion show was the year before last. You can see the video here. Yup, I did 1830s - and you can see very clearly that the 1830s hadn't grown on me yet, because I certainly wasn't thrilled to be wearing it. I was a newbie to the Museum and was really only interested in the late 1850s-first half of the 1860s and not the craziness of the 1830s. Now the 30s is one of my very favorite decades, I just prefer the second half of the decade, when they toned down the crazy sleeves a little. This year, I represented the first decade of the 1900s, which I think of as "the S-Bend period" because of the corset style that was most popular then. 

The poor S-Bend corset gets a lot of grief in the modern world. Poor, poor thing, it's really not its fault that we as a whole are pretty ignorant about the realities of corsets, or that because we now expect our own bodies to do the same job as corsets in serving as a foundation for our clothing, or that because we expect our bodies to be a certain shape without any help, we've sexualized the corset and demonized it all at the same time. The S-Bend corset in particular gets a lot of negativity thrown its way because of this: 

 

We see pictures of women from the period and we see illustrations like this from advertisements and assume that the corset is forcing that woman into that "horribly unnatural shape." Well, first of all, that particular image is a drawing. Drawings are only subject to logic, realistic anatomy, and the laws of physics if the artist chooses for them to be, and artists are not required to be logical or respect laws of physics by any means! 

Let's look at some photographs of actual women, shall we? Oh, here's one: 

I love this image. My certainty that she's got quite a bit of padding helping along those exaggerated curves is in the mid-to-high 90s. 

If we take away the padding exaggerating the shape, this is what we get:

And all that is, is posing. Seriously. The corset isn't forcing her into that shape at all, it's just her bending her back and sticking her rear end out. Teenage girls do it in photographs all the time today and no one's accusing their clothes of forcing them into that shape. So, there's lesson one - the S-Bend shape is not a creation of the corset, it's a combination of padding and posing. 

What about the corset itself? 

This is from lucycorsetry.com. I would have used a different image, but the contrasting binding makes the gussets stand out so perfectly.

It's a pretty regular corset, with more flexibility to it so that you can really get that back bend when you need to. The big thing about the corset shape is that the hip gussets are not centered at the sides, they're set farther back. If you were to wear the corset without padding (which does on underneath the corset and acts like it were your own natural kind), the hip gussets would gently coax the displaced flesh towards the back. It doesn't make a dramatic difference in shape, in my opinion. 

So the big long post, in summary, is that I like S-Bend corsets, they get more credit than they deserve as shapewear, and should not be hated. 

Oh, and here's me!

The dress' creator and I, the lovely and talented Bevin Lynn

Our narrator/announcer at the fashion show and a great superior (very cooperative with my dreams of shoemaking!)

Padding and posing, padding and posing. In this case, LOTS of padding!