Corset Myths Intro

The modern world is a fairly bizarre thing. People who used to go to libraries and spend hours digging up slightly dodgy information and at least have a book to back them up can now go onto the internet, spend a quarter of the time searching and come up with things that are so fantastically fallacious that they are almost fictional masterpieces (although since they were found on the internet sprout from the mouth of a sixteen year old, they are always God's truth).
The internet is huge, rambling game of  broken telephone which collects together science, personal anecdotes and fairytales and moulds it into a endless and seamless myth which much like real life contains enough truth to make it believable and enough fallacy to make it interesting. This is not to say that there isn't pure information out there. It just that, like gossip, sensationalism spreads immedietly and completely and you have to dig a little to get to the truth. The older the truth, the harder it is to get at it.

Corsets have had a long and varied history as the one garment that is at once loved and reviled, it is steeped in stories that often started with Victorian era science (which as we all know was as enlightened as lobotomy) and were then embroidered over the next 150 odd years with the final flourish added by the internet.

I get dozens of people through my shop who come bearing myths about corsetry from women dying from corsetry through to Catherine de Medici.  Most of the myths are so ridiculous that I can't imagine why anyone would believe them, others are down-right hilarious and a few are actually dangerous.It has become a bit of an obsession to debunk them so I am going to be doing a series over time (and as they get brought in ) about corset myths, and on the flipside - corset truths.

The thing about corsets is that so much of what is corset is, is built on fable, the myths give the garment life and mystery and excitement, but at the same time, the truth is often far stranger and more interesting and I think that with the speed and spread of information there will always be something new and fascinating to discuss.
If you have read, seen or heard something that you would like to find out more about, please send it to me (arwen@arwen.co.za), or leave me a message in the comments and we'll see where this all leads...

A.