Corset or no Corset?

             After reading Fashioning the Bourgeoisie: A History of Clothing in the Nineteenth Century by Philippe Perrot I walked away with a greater understanding of my Trousseau Dress and look forward to Clare coming into our class tomorrow to continue the discussion on dress’s in the 19^th century. A very interesting point that I drew from the book was that fashion was an indicator of class. Perrot states “clothes became organized as significative differences within a code and as status symbols with hierarchy”.  Thus the choice of dress was determined based on your class and what was expected from your class when it came to style.  The reason why the relationship between fashion and class are important because in our society today we do not use fashion as a determining factor as to whether or not one is wealthy, we use cars and electronics to show off affluence. Thus, I believe that clothes hold the same symbolic meaning as electronics and cars do today in which an individual was able to be identified as to which class they belonged to base on their outfit and the materials used for the dress.

            Another point that I found interesting from the book was that women wore numerous outfits throughout the day. I found this point to be important because the Trousseau dress that I was assigned was an evening dress. Throughout the day women were expected to have a certain amount of skin covered up, thus one would have to have a breakfast dress in which they could wear the dress throughout the morning. Then the woman would have to plan on changing into an afternoon dress in which it was appropriate for a lady to show off a bit more skin.  Finally, the female had an evening dress which showed off the most amount of skin. Perrot stated that even on special occasions women would change their outfits, thus it was normal for a female to make anywhere between 5-8 outfit changes. These changes occurred because it was necessary! The corset still amazes me, the young lady that wore my dress had to wear a corset underneath because the design of the dress was to show off a small waist and emphasize the posterior bust. Perrot stated that even though corsets were the trendy and women wore them in order to make themselves appear more attractive the corsets “threatened the body” and gave women a higher chance of becoming infected with “sickness”.

On pg. 153 Perrot stated that over a 40 year period of observation of the corset out of 100 women; 25 “succumbed to diseases of the chest, 15 died after their first delivery, 15 remained infirm after delivery, 15 became deformed. The most interesting thing about these numbers were that as these negative health issues occurred as a result of the corset women still wore the corset.  I then thought back to my first point that fashion was a way to classify you with a social class. Thus many women of the upper class knew that by wearing a corset it not only made them look more attractive however it also showed everyone else that they belonged to the wealthy class. 

I am really excited to hear the discussion in class tomorrow and especially from my classmates that had dresses as their objects. I wonder if they were able to determine what class potentially their object would fall under.