The Century Corset Challenge: a Neo-Victorian Reproduction

Article originally posted on Foundations Revealed September 2015. Photos forthcoming

What if a Victorian corsetière had access to today’s tools and materials? What if a 21st-century corset-maker were faithful to yesterday’s techniques and craftsmanship? To answer that question, I made a corset: a small-herringbone-weave gray blue coutil with black French lace, fashioned in the spirit of a W.H.K & S “Catharine Hayes” original over a hundred years old, informed by Luca Costigliolo’s class at the School of Historical Dress in London, but designed and made in 2015 at my workshop in downtown San Jose, California.

Figure 1. Original corset from front, side, and back.

Then and Now
Obviously, original fabrics are no longer readily available. Whalebone is now plastic and steel. Treadles have been replaced by the electric motor. But these are technological accidents of constraint and circumstance. The design secrets of the Victorian corset are timeless – they have to do with stitch length, boning width, curvature of the busk, cut and grainline, hand flossing, eyelet size, placement of lace, and type and size of lacing. Some of these ideas achieved a peak of perfection over a century ago, and (some say) have been unequalled since, like the legendary Damascus steel. But some Victorian achievements are accessible to anyone with an eye for detail. Many of the lessons I learned making this corset will stay with me through the rest of my career. I write this article to share them with other corset-makers, in the hopes that the “secrets of the ancients” will find a wider audience today.
Where it comes to historicism, the corsetry world is animated by a genteel controversy. One camp believes that the Victorian corset is unimprovable – ne plus ultra. Luca Costigliolo, my teacher at the School of Historical Dress (London, UK), creates corsets with unimpeachable historical fidelity: his creations have been worn in The Borgias and productions of Twelfth Night and Much Ado About Nothing. The other camp believes that as physiques and fashions change, the corset must change too, not just in technique but also in aesthetics. Standards of beauty continually evolve. Differences in diet, exercise, even genetics may mean that the average body today is different to those of our great-great-grand-parents. Still, the range of today’s body types were probably fully represented in Victorian times. Large busts, taller individuals, longer torsos, obese or stout women were all corseted.
I respect both these schools of thought. My humble Hegelian hybrid attempts to draw on the best of Victorian aesthetics and technique, while taking advantage of modern materials and machinery, to make the best of both worlds. I would like to think that my little piece would find favour with any corset-wearer from 1840 to today. This is not so hard to believe: consider that a man in a modern three-piece suit could be transported to any time in the last 150 years I imagine without shocking anyone too much.
Learning From History
By definition, no reproduction can be authentic; at best it is a competent forgery. What we can do instead is aim beyond the past, seeking the same lofty goal as our spiritual ancestors, and (if the gods smile) strike as close, or even closer, to the target. I’ve made over a hundred bespoke corsets but this one is the most historically accurate, and at the same time one of the most comfortable, wearable, and beautiful.
Before knowing comes seeing. Set aside preconceived notions about construction, techniques, and supplies; look closely and clearly. It was Luca Costigliolo’s class that helped me stand off my own notions about how to make a corset; to identify historical details and animating principles to make a better reproduction than I would have otherwise.
I would love to share everything that Luca taught me, together with everything I have learned over the years. But that would take an entire book – at least. So I will limit this article to a few of the previously-mentioned details that set this corset apart.
The original which inspired this reproduction is a W.H.K & S “Catharine Hayes” corset, circa 1890–1905, described in detail in my previous article. I’ll refer to it in this article simply as Catharine.

Boning
The next thing that really stood out was the width and type of boning really looked different than what I see most currently corsetmakers using, some for obvious reasons like the lack of readily available whalebone. In many of my corsets I tend to use narrow spiral steel on the side lines to easily follow the curve of a dramatic silhouette. In many Victorian corsets I have studied, by contrast, the bones on the side of the body are actually wider and sturdier bones! This surprised me. In my corset I used a mix of flat steel and plastic whalebone of varying widths.
A Side Note On Side Seams
In my admittedly limited experience I have only seen one Victorian corset (during my visit to Symington) with what I would consider a side seam (perfectly perpendicular to the waist). In current corsetry, there is a definite trend in the “side line” seam running down the body based off of a straight waist around the body. Some are drafted this way perhaps for ease of alterations for theatrical use, some purely for the ease of adjusting or creating pattern drafts. A definite focus on reduction along a small range of the side of the body has changed some of the shaping I see in corset drafts. The shaping of the dramatic curves in this Victorian corset actually come more from the angled cut of the panels – without a side seam on the body. I think taking historical patterns and trueing them up to a straight waistline and all the panels with grain lines perpendicular to this arbitrary waist horizontal to the ground takes away the intricacies of the cut and interaction with the body. So paying attention to the angles of the panels themselves and grain-lines on the fabric in the original help to create a more believable, more historical shaping in my reproduction.
Waist Tape
In the same vein we should look at the waist tape and its lack of following a straight path from the back to the front across the body. The waist tape is dipped down into an angle at the front. I think this also affects the way the corset is wrapped around the waistline and creates the historical shape we are after. The exterior yoke that is added does support the body around the top straight edge but the primary support from the waist tape is actually not straight around. Now that I’ve made two corsets with dipped waist tapes I’m not sure I’ll ever go back. Using the very straight-across method means you have a tape that will signify and mark easily the sizing of the garment so perhaps for off-the-rack corsets it will allow for ease of measurement and clarity and therefore makes sense in mass production. However the beauty of the extended front torso with the dipped waist tape is mighty tempting to start putting in all my designs.

Figure 2 . Finding the angle of the waist tape on the original and steaming the cotton waist tape into shape prior to insertion into the corset.

Figure 3. Stamping the waist tape to identify the maker, not unlike the original which also had a name along the waist tape interior.

Figure 4 . Hand basting in the angled waist tape very close to the edge to keep the tape from folding over during construction of the boning channels.
Available Fabrics
The next thing I consider really important is the choice of materials for my reproduction.
Some purists would only be satisfied if I had sourced hundred-year-old bolts of cloth. I believe that achieving period results with modern fabrics means an even better mastery of the craft. Hey, at least it’s not polyester!
I actually intended to make up the corset in cream or ivory like the original Catharine. But an entire article of low-contrast cream-on-cream photos might poorly demonstrate the items we are discussing! I’ve often seen the technique of using a different color thread in tutorials and chose to go for contrasting stitching and detailing for this article.
My favorite coutil is a super fine german coutil purchased back in 2008 before the factory stopped weaving it. It is the closest to Catharine’s coutil but for the sake of this project I chose a fine coutil in a gray-blue with a small herringbone weave from Farthingales in Canada. The secondary fabric is a blue satin weave coutil in a very similar colorway also purchased through Farthingales. If anyone has a great source for matte satin coutil in cream or white I’m all ears by the way.
Thickness
Compared to Catharine, even the finest coutil currently in production uses a thicker thread for weaving, so the final product is less supple (regardless of sizing to stiffen the fabric). This means that the reproduction will be a bit more bulky and not as delicate and elegant as the original antique.

Figure 5. Solstiss lace folded over to show the correct width on the original, compared with my final use of the black full width lace.
The type of lace is also important and here is where I chose, at the last minute, to just use what I had on hand, like a boss. This is a lovely lace from Solstiss in France that I picked up from the great deal we had from the Oxford Conference of Corsetry last year (2014). I have this in both cream and black. At first I wanted to use the cream to keep with the pale tone of the original, but the black really, again due to photographic considerations, felt like a necessary compromise (read: prettier on screen). I do have some leads on sources for lace much more similar to Catharine’s, but decided to fake the styling by adding a lace beading (lace that has holes worked into it to allow lacing to be drawn through either decoratively or as a draw-string) to the bottom of the lace to create a similar look. I could have cut off the Soltiss lace to create the same length of lace as in Catharine but it is so expensive and looks so pretty with a wider lace top edge that I couldn’t bear wasting the inch or so of lace just in the effort to recreate this corset. I think I’ve successfully maintained the style of the corset without reproducing it exactly: good enough. It’s artistic license.
Boning
After you have carefully cut the corset panels from your appropriate fabric, and stitched with your small stitch length, pressed your seam to the side or open, inserted your angled waist tape with hand stitching, and then added your yoke to the front, then come the boning channels.

Figure 6. Corset panels stitched together, trimmed, and pressed open preparing to add the waist yoke and then boning channels applied over it.

Figure 7. Finding the yoke positioning and boning channel placement based on the original by using pins through both items.

Figure 8. Front and back of the corset during construction showing the basted waist tape with yoke applied on the front.
The channels are applied over the yoke and anchor the waist tape at the back once stitched. I made sure to stitch my yoke with two rows of stitching along each edge like in Catharine. I suspect Catharine’s was done with a twin needle machine in the factory. I measured each channel and created my boning channels with fabric that is 3 times the width folded and then applied so that the bones can be inserted with two layers of fabric on each side of the bone. This is a great way to get a sturdy construction method on a very thin single layer corset.

Figure 9 . Drawing on the boning channel placement to match the original and showing the first 3 channels applied to the reproduction.

Figure 10 . Boning being inserted into the channel with two layers on top and the third layer of the channel plus the one layer of the corset construction below the bone, creating a sturdy entrapment of the boning.

Each bone casing is basted on and then top stitched with that short stitch length. The channel width is important because it matches the width of your boning. In this case we have a few different things going on. The front bones are all narrow and the whalebone has a thickness to it that actually stands out and creates a touch of a ridge that is visible in the channel. I used 5mm×1mm synthetic whalebone from Wissner to mimic the look and feel of Catharine’s whalebone. It isn’t as stiff as flat steel and has a little give side-to-side like whalebone, but unlike spiral steel it still smooth out and does not move dramatically side to side. I have since acquired 5mm×1.35mm that would be better suited to create the thickness I noticed.

Figure 11. Creating the yoke, comparing to original and final pieces ready to be attached via two rows of top-stitching.

Figure 12 . Side by side comparison of boning channels having been applied at the front over the yoke.

Figure 13. Different boning and other supplies for the project, the cream changed out for black in the final production.
What you choose, and why, may vary for your purposes but for this reproduction the synthetic whalebone made the most sense. The side wider bones are magnetic, as well as the two bones at the center back which are actually pretty thick, stiff, and wider than the ¼” boning commonly used by current corset-makers.
A little detail that was fun to reproduce is the two tiny bones the top of the center back panels. These I think were there to allow that upper edge on a higher backed corset to give a little to cup around the back. I’ve seen it on a few antique corsets and am unsure if my theory is correct but it was another little detail to notice and get right to have the look of the original.

Figure 14 . Cutting boning along the center and filing before inserting into the corset.

For the narrow boning on the side of the larger steel bones on the sides of the body as well as the tiny ones at back I cut the synthetic whalebone with paper scissors and filed them with an emery board (normally used your nails). Luca pointed out in our class a nice fine sandpaper also works well to blunt the tips of the synthetic whalebone.

Figure 15 . Back boning detail with tiny synthetic whalebone and lace applied over the tiny grommets.
Busk
I mention the busk to point out some differences between what was available then and now. There are current makers and manufacturers who are pushing the boundaries and experimenting with differently colored (Narrowed visions) and Engraved busk loops (Vanyanis) but I am more referring to the shape of the busk loops themselves, the spacing of said loops. There is actually a great range of busk closures found in Victorian corsets as things were invented and improved upon but many went into disuse. The straight steel busk it its current form is actually pretty close to what we see in Catharine. The spacing however is not. From a design perspective I put in my new laurel engraved busk. For future reproductions I’d consider getting custom busks produced to mimic the actual shape of the loops and spacing on the original to see how it affects the fit and function if at all. In Catharine the busk does run almost from the top to the bottom of the corset binding with the exception of a small space at the bottom where it is anchored with decorative stitching coordinating with the bone flossing.

Figure 16 . Modern produced busk side by side with original antique. The loops are more straight on the side and spaced further apart in Catharine.

Figure 17. Modern engraved busk used in final corset.
In the antique the busk has also been shaped with a curve at the bottom which I mimicked through hand shaping from the bottom of the waist tape down.