A Dress Historian Explains the Difference between Corsets and Stays

I love that they think that the doctors, who had issues keeping women alive during childbirth, could cut a person open to remove a rib or three and keep them alive after!

I am squealing with joy at how far the costuming community has come in getting lots of ACTUAL ACCURATE INFORMATION out into the mainstream in this area. Nowadays it's like a relentless collective flood of SERIOUSLY GUYS WE'RE NOT DEAD YET NO REALLY and Actual Research in THIS level of detail, and it's a joy to see!

Look as a woman who is "blessed" in boob department a corset/stays seems like it would be hella more comfortable on my shoulders and back than the current over the shoulder bolder holders.

As a currently 6mo pregnant woman with her second baby, I can see SO MANY health benefits to corsets for women in the past! Women had babies, usually LOTS of babies, or they died in child birth quite often. Being pregnant usually causes diastasis recti (separation of the abs), causing structural instability. Without proper PT and rehab, it can cause all sorts of issues, including issues with subsequent pregnancies where the baby won’t be in the right position because the skeletal structure of the mom isn’t optimal. I’m currently wearing a belly support band to counteract ALL of those issues (and yet no one would sneeze at my using it now, so why would women have sneezed at “corset” support then?). There are also issues with organs not being supported correctly because of poor core strength. So corseted support may have helped keep organs in place more than be the cause of the displacement! We are just now starting to understand much of these issues that most women/mothers face, and yet past generations dealt with the consequences in very practical ways. They may not have known how to address the underlying problem with functional physical therapies, but they did creat garments that helped with so many issues. If you were faced with possible death from a baby not being in optimal position or dealing with crippling joint issues from lack of stabilization v wearing a supporting garment every day, you’d wear the garment! And that doesn’t even touch the topic of breast size and the added weight of lactating breasts! The sad thing is that we have become so far removed from what it means and is like to be a biologically functioning female, that we have lost all ties to the women that came before us and can’t begin to comprehend their realities of day to day life! They weren’t just vain and oppressed women. They were practical and purposeful people who we should learn from and not put down because we do not fully understand them!

I’d be down for an entire series about this tbh

Last historical reference to ‘stays’ my granny in 2010 before she passed away aged 96. She was brought up by her Victorian farmer grandmother (whose mother had been a dressmaker) and she ALWAYS referred to her control underwear as ‘having her stays on’ my mind was boggled as a child!!! 😂

3:20 women today also use surgery to get the right size/shape (there’s still an ideal shape....think of the instabody) what’s interesting to me is that they’re still adding padding to the same areas, it’s just fat underneath the skin instead of a bustle underneath the skirt.

Ah, well done! Just a note: A "brasserie" is a place to get beer (brewery and pub). A "brassière" is the ol' "over-the-shoulder-boulder-holder". But that was fun :)

the hilarious thing about your rant about women dying from corsets is....my nan actually DID have an 18 inch waist on her wedding day but she's also a tiny, very very slim 5'2 woman (or was when she was married, she's shorter now) who weighs less than I did as a pre-teen perfectly possible for someone to have that small of a waist without a corset, but you have to be small everywhere else too, bodies are designed to be in proportion

As someone who used to live in an old house which had wide stone walls and was only heated by fire places in the winter, I can completely understand why someone might layer underwear and clothing in a bizarre way. My pyjama days were generally corsets, vest tops, pj's, jumper and jeans days. My sister in law would sometimes wear 2 bras because every layer helps. We could never understand why my father in law didn't seem to get cold, now I realise most of his clothes were wool.

I used to do ballet. The costumes were designed by Pat Padilla of Houston Ballet. One thing I remember about the design of the classical ballet costume was the bodice. Often, the bodice looked like many of the stays shown in this video. I've also had to wear a corset with Victorian style gowns. Both proved quite supportive and were not the torture devices they are often made out to be.

I will always watch deep dives into the history of words and the evolution of language. It's so fascinating

Boning vs cording explanation: Boning is to a corset as your bones are to your body. Cording is to a corset as cartilage is to your ears.

The word “stays” is a hard one to promote using an algorithm, since it can be a verb as well as a noun, and is used in far more different contexts than “corset” is.

Every time Abby said “corsets became mainSTAYS in women’s garments” I laughed

Oh dear, well if you think doing web searches for “stays” is troublesome, please please please don’t look up “boning” 😂😂

I never get enough of the dumpster fire.... Stays are more comfortable than bras, but have never given me an 18” waist.

I love this. A serious examination by a serious scholar who is serious about not being overly serious and stuffy is a serious step forward for scholarship! Thank you, Abby.

"I hope you guys are ready for an entomology rabbit hole" always Abby. Always.

I was really hoping for a family tree type flow chart when you said corsets and stays are cousins and then brought up bodies, jumps, and brassieres. I'm also really happy that when I became interested in modern corsets, I somehow missed or skipped all that annoying myth garbage and went straight to people who knew what they were actually talking about.