Not your grandmother's Victoria's Secret

My grandmother wore a corset. No joke. An authentic, honest-to-God, corset.

And she wore it every day of her life, whether she was heading for church, hoeing her vegetable garden, or taking to her bed with a book.

(Just to give this factoid a little perspective, my grandmother was born in 1886. We called her “mammaw,” a bastardization of "maman," a throwback to her Creole roots. Until the day she died she kept a secret stash of confederate money, “just in case”. And when in her home, we had our choice of warm Dr. Pepper or cold, mouth-puckeringly sweet, tea. Ask for anything else, and you were considered uppity.)

Anyway…I was fascinated by it as a child. It wasn’t a lovely corset. It wasn’t, for example, the sort of red-and-black satin-and-lace C'mon boys, nice to meet you garment Victoria’s Secret models traipse around in. It was a supremely everyday, keep-things-tucked-in, down-to-business type of garment, similar to this one:

Ventilated corset with removable busk of 1915. Grey coutil interlined with Hessian. It features eyelets for ventilation, detachable spoon busk, and decorative lace.

(Um...Detachable spoon busk???)

In 1886, when my grandmother was born, a lady might well have lured a man to matrimony with a waist cruelly cinched to an impossible sixteen inches, only to show her massive girth of, say, all of twenty inches on her wedding night...after the hapless groom was already ensnared.

The underpinnings -- or unmentionables, as my grandmother would say-- from past eras were all about showing oneself to be something one wasn't: Enhanced bustle-booties to rival J-Lo, tiny waists a man could wrap his hands around, and breasts ridiculously hoisted up or painfully flattened down, according to the prevailing fashion.


Putting aside, for the moment, the questionable morality of snagging a person’s offer of marriage based upon the wonders of whalebones and silk, I wonder how this sort of thing works in today’s world.

Take, for example, the recent plethora of coyly named “foundation garments”. Don’t they pretty much amount to…ya know…false advertising?

I'm not claiming moral superiority. After all, if I were going up for an Academy Award, you bet your life I’d hire the best experts available for hoisting and supporting and cinching and doing whatever it takes to make a person look inhumanly, unattainably, beautiful up in front of the world.

But seriously, how many of us modern women will be able to keep those Spanx shapers a secret until after the commitment ceremony?

If I wear a corset, I want it to be a frilly seductive thing, full of nonsensical ribbons and lace…you know, the kind of undergarments that look lumpy and bizarre under modern dresses. The kind that's really meant to stand on its own, not as an underpinning at all.

Sorry mammaw, but these days, in my world, that corset would be all about the sex.