It was British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans who discovered a Cretan figure dating back to about 2000 BCE. The sculpture was that of a topless woman with a waist cinched by a belt helping depict a small waist. Even the ancient Greeks wrote about undergarments that made women’s waists tiny and flattened the chest area.

Corsets worn for extended periods of time caused back problems. The boning structure was mostly immobile so posture remained straight when corsets were laced. That led to back and pectoral muscle atrophy, resulting in women having to rely on their corsets to stay upright.

Corsets restricted a woman’s lungs severely. The vital organs couldn’t fully expand, so breathing was painful. Lung conditions like tuberculosis and pneumonia were common and often exacerbated by the corset. Women were susceptible to these illnesses since their lower lungs were constantly bound.

At the beginning of the 16th century, European corsets pushed an aristocratic woman’s bosom upward making her upper half appear fuller. The material ran down the front, shaping the torso like a cylinder.

In the 17th century, the corsets looked more like cones with two pieces of fabric with thick boning combining to further narrow down the waist.

Corsets were more forgiving from 1800 to 1830, as women’s stomachs were left unbridled. Smaller undergarments loked more like 21st century bras.

The Victorian era began in 1837, and under Queen Victoria, corsets once again restricted the belly, making hourglass figures popular. Longer restrictive undergarments extending past the waist were necessary, allowing steel boning to create the shape.

Victorian fashion had women wearing tops with large shoulders and hoop skirts that covered multiple layers of crinoline. Clothing designers mass-produced corsets during the Industrial Revolution so people could easily buy them.

Queen Victoria died in 1901, so the style changed under King Edward whose courtiers wore corsets with an “S-bend.” These forced women to tilt forward with their hips and bosom pushed forward, giving their backs an unnatural dip.

Corsets had been around for centuries, but metal eyelets were added in the 1820s and 1830s, causing tight-lacing to become popular. Threading the strings of the corset through the eyelets then pulling considerably was the way to wear them.

Women were tied in, not caring about reverting back to their natural forms. Tight-lacing caused young women to faint as their breathing was constricted because of the style.

Acquaintances would loosen a woman’s corset laces or stays if she fainted allowing air to flow freely into the lungs. Some analysts even believed that the tight clothing caused heartburn, distension, and varicose veins due to restricted blood flow.

Not everyone condoned corsets and the tight lacing that followed the undergarment’s style. Lancet is one of the oldest medical journals, and they published articles about the dangers of corsets in the 1880s and ’90s. The Sacred Heart Review also wrote this in 1890:

“[Tight lacing] cannot be but hurtful… the veriest novice in anatomy understands how by this process almost every important organ is subjected to cramping pressure, its functions interfered with, and its relations to other structures so altered as to render it, even if it were itself competent, a positive source of danger to them.”

Surgeon William Henry Flowers wrote in his 1881 book, Fashion in Deformity, that tightly-laced corsets were similar to skull-shaping and foot-binding in terms of causing harm to the wearer.

The latter part of the 18th century saw men wear form-fitting trousers and jackets. Corsets were the answer to get a smoother silhouette.But the French and Englishmen stopped wearing them in the middle of the 19th century. Men who still wore corsets were teased.

Austrian men still wore corsets though. An English gentleman attended an elite Austrian boarding school and had this to say in the 1867 issue of The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine:

“From personal experience, I beg to express a decided and unqualified approval of corsets. I was early sent to school in Austria where lacing was not considered ridiculous in a gentleman as in England, and I objected in the thoroughly English way. A sturdy [school attendant] was deaf to my remonstrance, and speedily laced me up tightly in a fashionable Viennese corset… It is from no feeling of vanity that I have ever since continued to wear them fro, not caring to incur ridicule, I take good care that my dress shall not betray me…”

Corsets go back to as early as the 16th century when aristocratic women wore bodices reinforced with whale bones and tusks in place of ones made from cloth and silk. Pieces of wood and metal were soon added to the front of corsets for more structure.

The Duchess of Montpeniser, Anne Marie Louise d’Orléans, had a metal corset that she had decorated with a crown and fleur-de-lis.

Napoleon Bonaparte campaigned to get rid of corsets. He called them “the implement of detestable coquetry which not only betrays a frivolous bent but forecasts the decline of humanity.”

Bonaparte’s female lovers still wore corsets, but some medical professionals believed they could cause infertility.

C.J. Dickinson is a professor emeritus at Wolfson Institute of Preventive Medicine. He says that tight clothing could result in endometriosis, which can cause lesions on the uterus lining. Constricting these lesions may cause internal bleeding and result in scar tissue forming.

By the 1920s, corsets were no longer in fashion, giving way to flapper dresses that gave women a more androgynous look. They no longer cared about an hourglass figure as women who wore these flowing dresses were mostly young and single.

Many of these women had jobs during the day then partied at night. Flappers even got rid of the long locks associated with Victorian women.