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How Did Pregnancy Corsets Work?

“Thank you all for your patience as we recovered from the Costume Review, moved studios, and set a whole bunch of plans in motion for the coming year. We’ve got lots of exciting content coming your way that I hope will be worth the wait!

In the meantime, I thought we’d start off with a topic people have been asking about in my comments sections for years: did people wear corsets even while pregnant? How did that work??

I’ve been waiting specifically until I could recruit a colleague to join me for this topic, since there are a few really amazing researchers out there who have gone deep into the historical evidence and published some fantastic work on it. Enter: Sarah Bendall, who I hope you’ll love to watch as much as I enjoyed chatting with her!

I must admit though, I’m not a complete stranger to the subject of maternity corsetry. The Claydon reconstruction which is on display in this video and which was very kindly loaned to us by the School of Historical Dress was actually the second-ever historical reconstruction project I got to do whilst working with them nearly a decade ago now. The hundreds of boning channels are, admittedly, done by machine, but the rest of the stays, the original stomacher as well as the conjectured stomacher are all done by hand from silk, linen ticking, and synthetic whalebone. Even without the boning channels, the project still took around three weeks—and the sight of my hands by the end of it would not have been one for the faint of heart! It’s always magical though, in a strange inverted way, to get such a (literal) hands-on sense of the physical demand of garment construction.”

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