Unravelling the history of women's clothing

“To become slender in the waist, and to have a straight spagnolised body, what pinching, what girdling, what cringing will [women] not endure … that their very skin and quick flesh is eaten and consumed to the bones, whereby they sometimes work their own death.”

These are the words of Michel de Montaigne, a 16th century philosopher and social critic, in one of his many critiques of the much-maligned corset.

This controversial undergarment has long been viewed as an instrument of male oppression; a demeaning device laced so tightly that it restricts breathing and causes agonising pain. 

And yet, according to Sarah Bendall, a material culture historian who has worn many a corset as part of her research, the perception that they’re unbearably uncomfortable is largely untrue.

“I liken it to wearing a new pair of leather shoes,” says Dr Bendall, a research fellow at ACU’s Gender and Women’s History Research Centre, and author of Shaping Femininity.

“They can be stiff and uncomfortable at first, when they rub and sometimes give you blisters. But after a while, they loosen up and mould to your body. That’s what a corset does. It’s the sort of garment you adapt to, and before long, you’ve almost forgotten you’re wearing one.”

In recent years, Dr Bendall and her contemporaries have worked to challenge the negative narratives surrounding these centuries-old fashion items. They note that much of the historical criticism of corsets came from men who had never worn one, and who may have had underlying motives for belittling them. 

“You have these male voices in these moralising texts talking about how terrible these things were, and it has the effect of ridiculing the women who wore them as silly and overly vain,” she says.

On the other hand, it is demonstrably true that corsets remained popular for hundreds of years.

In the 16th century, they were mainly elite garments worn by women in royal courts, while their male counterparts wore doublets, a style of jacket that is similarly snug. By the 17th and 18th centuries, corsets (then known variously as ‘bodies’, ‘stays’ and ‘farthingales’) were popular among many different classes of women, allowing them to achieve a silhouette that matched the cultural and social ideals of the time.

“The sheer number of women who continued to wear corsets, even when the rhetoric surrounding them was really terrible, being labelled as promiscuous and the like, it tells you something,” says Dr Bendall, who as well as her academic work has written about corsets and hoop skirts in mainstream articles and social media.

“Rather than being an item of patriarchal oppression, it seems far more likely that women really wanted to wear these garments, and when you study the sources, you see that it might not be this huge oppressive thing it’s been made out to be.”

Reconstructing history

Long before she became a material culture historian, Sarah Bendall had an interest in historical fashion.

“I always wanted to be an archaeologist,” says Dr Bendall, who began her bachelor’s degree in 2009, and completed her PhD in 2018. “Archaeology is primarily a study of objects to study culture, and that love of objects has never left me, but the context changed when I started to become interested in dress.”

She remembers receiving an invite to a friend’s history-themed fancy dress party. As a keen hobby sewer, she decided that rather hiring or buying a costume, she would make one herself – and it would have to be historically accurate.

In the process of creating this elaborate medieval gown, she began to grasp the value of recreative historical practice.

“I realised that this was an amazing way of studying and learning about the past through the clothes that people wore, because it’s not just clothing,” she says. “We don't just wear clothing to cover our bodies, we wear it to express ourselves, to find our place within the community we live in, and recreative practice seemed like a valuable way of exploring that.”

Many years on, and many handmade garments later, Dr Bendall is among a small but dedicated cohort of experts who make historical clothing and employ it as a research method.

Her work follows other approaches of recreative practice, closely following the patterns and dimensions of surviving garments, and hand-sewing them using traditional techniques.

Once the garment is completed, it’s time for it be worn – by Dr Bendall herself, and by others who she closely observes. This process has allowed her to explore previously unanswerable questions about corsets: Do they really restrict the body in the manner described in historical accounts?

Her answer? Don’t believe everything you read.

“We’ve found that corsets are light and manageable, and you can manoeuvre around in them,” she says.

“That’s not to say that every woman who wore a corset historically would have loved wearing one, but they’re not these heavy cages that the sources make them out to be.”

While recreative practice can never tell us exactly how a 16th or 17th-century woman felt while wearing a corset or hoop skirt, it serves as a useful tool for assessing the accuracy of written sources, and their potential for exaggeration or fallaciousness.

“It’s a means to tap into these women's experiences that weren't recorded by women themselves, giving them a voice while helping us to develop a clearer picture of the past.”

Learning through making

Like many historians of fashion and material culture, Sarah Bendall is a product of the online movement of historical costuming enthusiasts that has flourished over the past decade.

In 2023, along with fellow fashion historian Dr Serena Dyer who was herself a hobby sewer before she became an academic, she launched the Making Historical Dress Network. Funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, the network aims to provide a hub for the international community of academics and practitioners who work on recreative methods in dress history, “from costume makers to scholars, from curators to YouTubers”.

Dr Bendall notes that in many cases, there is crossover between the different parts of this community.

“A lot of us doing recreative practice in dress history at universities these days have come out of these online spaces, where we started off as hobby sewers and ended up incorporating that into our academic work,” she says.

“One of biggest themes that has come out of the network and all of its events is that there’s value in collaboration between people of different knowledge and skill sets, because it can help you get a fuller, more comprehensive view of a particular historical period or a particular garment, whether it’s a farthingale or a mantua gown, or even just a specific material used to make these garments.”

The latter of those, the mantua, was at the centre of a recent collaboration between academics and craft practitioners in the UK. Over the course of two days, Dr Bendall was part of a team of experts who reconstructed a version of the 17th century gown, an item of clothing that paved the way for women’s involvement in the fashion industry.

Dr Bendall wearing the mantua gown on the grounds of Hampton Court. The collaboration involved fellow academics Serena Dyer, Rebecca Morrison and Lis Gernerd, and practitioners Michelle Barker and Brooke Welborn.

Before that time, dresses and other outer garments were made almost exclusively by male tailors. This began to change around the 1690s in London and Paris, where mantua makers and couturières ushered in a new movement of high fashion made by women, for women.

“This revolutionised women’s fashion and set the trend for the next century or so,” says Dr Bendall, who notes that very few examples of 17th century mantuas have survived, making the collaboration particularly valuable.

“We really don’t know a lot about these women and how they were making these garments, so the six of us sitting around a table trying to work out the pattern, trying to work out how certain bits go together, it helps us to understand the processes these historical dressmakers were going through, and the knowledge that they held.”

While she is quick to point out that recreative practice is “just one of many tools in a historian’s toolkit”, Dr Bendall is a strong believer in the notion that picking up a needle and thread can enhance our knowledge of the past.

“There are some objective truths in history, but in many cases a particular narrative has just always been the dominant narrative, and it’s often based on exaggerations and misunderstandings,” she says.

“We can learn a lot by putting our hands to work, so we can get a better and fuller understanding of the people who wore this clothing, and the people who made this clothing, and maybe go one step further in showing that the written sources might not always tell us the full story.”

Dr Sarah Bendall is a research fellow at ACU’s Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, where she researches and writes about the production, trade and consumption of global commodities and fashionable consumer goods between 1500 and 1800. She is active on Instagram, YouTube and Twitter, and commonly features on podcasts discussing corsets and items of historical fashion.