Corset Background

There has been an attraction to corsets by both women and men for a long time - 100's of years. The construction techniques and the shapes they form have changed in both type and variety and so have the components and materials used. In order to reproduce the correct shapes, you need to have an understanding of the variety of items used in today's corsets.

Body Shaping and Corsets

The oldest corsets are typically those with a minimal amount of curves. Your breast shape tends to be compressed and the subsequent reshaping of the breast mass gives a minimized appearance. To attain this profile you have to compress and reshape the regular curves and general shape of a woman's body.

Busks and Boning

The design of a corset is dependent on two underlying factors to be successful: a) the properties of the boning material, and b) how much you can tighten the lacing. To feel comfortable in your corset you are only able to tighten the laces so much, the boning provides the remainder of the support.

Steel boning is typically coated in nylon that is typically a light color and is created in a group of lengths, thicknesses, and widths. When selecting the spring steel boning for the best corset for you the thickness gives way to the width in importance. You are sure when you purchase a corset with the best steel boning because it is flexible and pliable, but it is very hard to bend it.

You can sometimes find busk fasteners that open and are used in the front of corsets to enable you to get into and out of your corset without help. These did not appear until around 1860 and began with the straight busk, the more detailed spoon busk was created ten years later. All of these items can be found in our online corset store.