Intimate Wear Of the 19th Century Woman
The phrase intimate wear includes underwear and lingerie for women that’s personal to her physical body and unlike outerwear, inner wear consists of items that are worn specifically for specific parts of the female body – the upper and lower parts. There wasn’t much of a variety of intimate lingerie for both parts of the body for the nineteenth century woman. The most important item to the fashionable woman was the all-important constricting corsets made with whale or steel bones. This singular item was basically meant to give a woman an hour-glass shape, popularly referred to as a figure 8. This was the mark of beauty! Wearing a corset all day long was torturous, and it could never have been worn without a helping hand, or two! But it was an important piece of intimate wear to have. Luckily towards the late 1880s, a women’s movement campaigning against the damage the corset of the time did to ribs and a woman’s internal organs caused by tight lacing, invented...