I went to Ripley’s Believe It or Not! museum in Times Square recently and came out with a whole bag of random beauty trivia (like the one above). Here are some more history on the fashion of cinched waists:
Queen Catherine de Medici of France declared that the ideal waist was just 13″! During the 1550’s, she banned thick midriffs from her court and unwittingly launched the corset craze – a gut-crushing trend that would define and confine fashionable women for the next 350 years.
A 23-year-old beauty with a tiny waist was the envy of the party — but two days later she inexplicably died. An autopsy revealed 3 broken ribs and a punctured liver. The killer? Her over-tightened corset. In the corset’s heyday, mysterious deaths of fashionable women were sometimes explained by autopsies that revealed stomachs nearly cut in two!
Believe it or not…
x
Shy
mmm embrace the gut.
Seriously…
So sad. You’d think knowing this kind of history, labels like Ralph Lauren would refrain from over photo-shopping the waists of their models, especially in this day and age.
I wish these came back in style!
Thats seriously scary. I’m very happy that trend died.