What Women Once Endured To Achieve Beauty

Hawera Star, Volume LIV, 15 June 1935, Page 12

What Women Once Endured To Achieve Beauty

DECENTLY, in London, at an exhibition featuring things monstrous as well as things beautiful, of by-gone days, there was displayed a corset as worn in the 15th century. . It consisted of horizontal and parallel strips of iron worked into a trcllised frame; it opened on metal hinges, and bolted down one side with small loops and pegs, similar to gate catches. The exhibition also included several examples of the Elizabethan corsets with their intricate whale-bone hoops encased in elaborate quilted brocades’, all of them too terrible to contemplate if worn through heat waves. There is every indication of whale-bone coming back again, but only as a support to the new shoulder-strap-less velvet evening gowns. The break-away from rigid corsetry oceuiTed just after the war, when women took to sports and games so wholeheartedly. Indeed, our whole mode of dress has been saner and simpler since then, and to-day the unbroken line is the soughtafter silhouette.