In 2019 I told my sister corsets were medieval torture devices Victorians tricked women into wearing to rearrange their organs, and if she bought that one from the market trader in Camden she’d wake up with no ribs and a squashed liver. She bought it. She’s fine. Her liver has not moved from where it started, as far as either of us are aware.
I mention this because I said that confidently; I’d never worn a corset, never looked up anything beyond a vague recollection of a school history lesson about tight lacing and had never once questioned how or where I’d got the “they rearrange your organs” line from. By some miracle I’d absorbed decades-old Victorian morals retold as medical fact and had been shouting about them from virtual rooftops for twenty years.
That’s what actually upsets me now, less that I was wrong about corsets specifically and more that I was so sure about something I’d never bothered verifying.
So let’s do that. Straight. To the corset. Because I think they deserve one: sorry, corset. I called you a gut-crusher for years without ever wearing one. You didn’t deserve that.
Where that “corsets damage your insides” idea comes from, actually
Most of the anti-corset organ-displacement panic comes from a few obsessed nineteenth century doctors and moral crusaders who were frankly more invested in controlling women’s behaviour than actually studying their skeletons. One famous illustration from the era uses a skeleton to show crushed ribs laced into a perfect wasp shape and you will still find that image pulled directly from archive into documentaries and listicles today; it’s presented as though it’s a literal medical record when it actually used to be pamphlet propaganda with a drawing tacked onto it. Some of it was genuine concern about a specific style of tight lacing being pushed to dangerous levels. Most of it was panic over allowing women autonomy over their own silhouette couched in pseudo-medical concerns about their wellbeing.
I haven’t seen anyone mention when bringing out that crush-your-ribs image just how varied “wearing a corset” can be. Tightening yourself into a 16 inch wasp waist over months or years of obsessive tightening is a completely different activity to putting on an underbust corset for a night out then taking it off four hours later when the carbonara arrives. But that modern distillation smooshes everything into one story warning, and I think that’s where the problem really starts, not with anyone’s ribs but with how we discuss it.
To be honest, better than I could have explained it was my colleague Priya’s eyes when I squeezed into one in a changing room and asked her if it “wouldn’t that move your kidneys about?” Which, yes I would have said that not a minute ago. I couldn’t tell her not to because “actually I don’t think it does”, said much less convincingly than everything I’d been saying up until that point. That disconnect, between how absolutely we say these things and how little we bother learning what’s true, is why I wanted to write this.
What really happens when you wear a corset, because I tracked down the facts
I bought an actual steel boned underbust corset, not one of the costume-shop faux versions with plastic boning that loses its shape after one wear and became comfortable in the loosest sense of the word, and wore that damn thing on and off for about six weeks; mostly for a couple of hours at a time, once for a full wedding all ceremony-to-an-hour-after-food wedding because why not. Here’s what I learned:
Firstly, none of what I expected to happen to my insides happened to my insides. There’s some truth in the restrictive part. Breathing feels different; higher in your chest rather than using your stomach to breathe in, which took me a bit to adjust to and left me slightly breathless ascending my front staircase. It does compress your waist. That’s literally the point of wearing a thing, and if you lace yourself too tightly too quickly your body will respond with a dull pain across your lower ribs that’s your-body-letting-you-know-in-a-reasonable-way to back off. I went too tight about a week in and ignored that pain for half an hour because fucking autocorrect on a wedding day. I ended up with faint red marks across my ribs that lasted about twenty four hours. Don’t do that. Wear a corset and you do not get to skip the break-in period everyone insists they don’t need. It’s there for a reason.
Beyond that dull pain if you push past the initial break-in period, no moving organs, no struggles to breathe that went beyond the weird-chestnut thing, and definitely no fainting-on-a-chaise-longue death fantasies I genuinely expected for some reason. I think because that image is so ingrained into every sensationalised telling of what-corsets-do it sort of snuck into the back of my mind and I expected it to happen as an embarrassing reveal that I had actually been right about them this whole time. It didn’t. My friend Deja used to do burlesque, and while she’s not worn them professionally recently wears corsets all the damn time. For hours. Real hours. She told me the actual downsides are far less than you’d think: longterm dependence on a corset for your posture can weaken core muscles (but so can literally everything else that replaces good posture with a gadget), tight lacing post-meals can cause some acid reflux, and if you wear one against bare skin all day without a liner it’ll irritate your skin. Not life threatening. Some of it uncomfortable. All of it totally manageable, and none of it the destruction of your ribcage I’d beenwarned about from school.
The bit where “can they damage your body” is kinda the wrong question
Here’s what I think happened to corsets over centuries of being told what they can and can’t do: the extreme version became the baseline. If you wear a corset tightened to the most extreme small circumference for years. Every day. Sleeping in it. Eating as little as possible to make it comfortable. Of course you’ll cause lasting damage to your body, probably your ribs. That was what happened historically in extreme cases and is what still happens to people now who take the specific and dedicated pursuit of extreme waist training and wear corsets twenty plus hours a day every single day for years with the intention of permanently reshaping their silhouette. That is not “just wearing a corset.” It is an activity.
It’s the difference between “exercise damages your muscles” if you say it how everyone says it as a blanket statement vs the real truth, which is that exercising to the point of real injury every single day with zero rest and bad form will destroy your muscles just like running those ultramarathons will wreck your knees if you do them often enough. Nobody introduces jogging by talking about running three fifty mile races back to back.
My mum is not a fashion person. She thinks most of my career has been clothes yelling at her, which isn’t far off. When I told her about wearing a corset to a wedding she asked me point blank “so is it safe or not”. I couldn’t answer her in under three sentences, because the truth is “maybe? It depends on how and how often you wear it.” But safe? Dryer safe than burning it but not as safe as hanging it? “It depends” is never as satisfying as people shouting about corsets want to believe but also “it depends” is true.
“It’s probably boring though” my mum said, and she’s right, it is boring. But boring is better than wrong, and also how I feel about my many years of very publicly knowing better about corsets than anyone who’d actually worn one.
If you want a corset, here’s what I’d tell you
Will wearing a corset damage your insides? If by “damage” you mean “causing permanent alterations and health problems”, no. Not if you treat your corset well. Wear it in, don’t lace yourself so tight you can’t breathe, and treat it as a garment instead of some magic slab that’ll keep your waist permanently gone if you just wear it enough. It will not rearrange your organs. It might restrict your breathing while you’re wearing it, sure, but it will absolutely change the look of every dress you own and fuck yes it will make you feel ten feet tall in photos before you take it off second you get home and probably eat like you’re hiding from the doctor for weeks because your body thinks you have.
Those that do end up with problems are generally people training their waists to extreme sizes for years, and even then… speaking from Deja again who’s worn them a lot; the ones seriously into that are a lot less likely to damage themselves than the anecdotes you’ll find everywhere else online suggest, because they know exactly what they’re doing and tend to monitor risks way more than your average horror story likes to admit. Waist trainers still exist but the few that I’ve talked to about it take it seriously enough that the hysteria doesn’t match the reality.
What really pisses me off about young me scolding my sister in that shop is that I wasn’t even trying to protect her from actual harm. I was parroting some high_school textbook rerun of a centuries-old moral panic no-one bothered to question because a bunch of dead Victorian doctors made a Political statement with a skeleton and everyone’s still replying on it without checking a fact.
I do not know where her sister’s liver is right now, but she wears that damn corset all the time. To two weddings and a friend’s fortieth. Laced to be comfortable. Takes it off when her body complains. And is entirely fine. I owe her several apologies I will probably never get the chance to give, but I think the corset deserves this one. You got shouted about for years over something you were never doing to people. I’m sorry about that.
