Dear Sir,–The other day I found a corset catalogue of about 1900, the heyday of the tight-lacing period. It contained elaborate instructions for the putting on and lacing up of a corset so as to achieve most effectively “the new small waist.”
It stated that if the wearer would but follow these instructions she would be delighted with the result. There was a charming illustration of a lady who had certainly succeeded in lacing her waist extremely tight and looking very pleased with it too!
But whether beginners – pretty little girls of twelve or so – were quite so delighted when they were made to lace their waist as tightly as this is very doubtful.
However, their protests, it is to be feared, carried little weight and met with sympathy as slight as their mercilessly controlled figures.
After all, they seem to have survived and anyway, they had to be trained in the way they should go. Probably their vanity soon compensated then when they found that these beautifully made stays, when properly put on and when the laces had been tightened up correctly, enabled them to wear the smart waist-belts then in vogue, drawn in to eighteen inches or so.
Truly, we who live now are a served generation – starved, that is of feminine beauty. What attraction is there in seeing a girl wear a dress which her brother could wear as easily?
The appalling ugliness of shingled heads, looking like so many mops of tow; the eternal light-coloured stockings, with knees and ankles usually thick and coarse, “beef to the heel like a Mullingar ox,” these are the nightmares that result from the idiotic athletic excesses of modern women.
No wonder so many marriages are failures! Romance is gone from present-day life. In vain we seek distraction in the hectic and garish pleasures of jazz music, cinemas, and dog racing to fill the void left by the vanished romance of feminine allurement.
Yours truly,
K.R. BROWNE.