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  • In pictures

Revealing the iron corset

There are around 15 iron corsets in museum collections around the world, including two in Wellcome Collection. Historians still dispute their purpose, but these intriguing objects hold clues about who would have worn them and why.

  • Article

Fashion for an unruly body

One weekend, just before an operation to correct her scoliosis, Rosalind Jana stopped trying to hide her body. Read how those two days helped her step into the future.

  • Article

Our endless quest for eternal youth

From poisonous 16th-century cosmetics to the latest “vampire facelift”, discover the fashions in unsavoury methods for improving our appearance.

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Images

  • Advert for Harness' Magnetic Corsets which shows two woman, one seated and one standing, wearing the corsets. Available from The Medical Battery Co. Ltd. 52 Oxford Street, London
  • Advertisment for Ball's Health Preserving Corsets, as worn by the Queen of Song, Adelina Patti.
  • Sarawak: three corsets worn by Sea Dayak and Land Dayak women. Photograph.
  • A nurse (?) presenting trusses, corsets and artificial limbs to those who need them. Colour lithograph by Henry Le Monnier, 1924.
  • The interior of a salon with fashionable people in hoop skirts and corsets, and in which even the servant and the dog are dressed up; satire of contemporary fashion. Engraving by T. Phillibrown after W. Hogarth.
  • Corset of iron, 18th century.
  • Maitland Cecil Melville Wills posing in a black corset and heavy skirt.
  • Maitland Cecil Melville Wills posing in a black corset and heavy skirt.
  • A dandy being laced into a tight corset by two servants. Coloured etching, 1819.
  • A dandy being laced into a tight corset by two servants. Coloured etching, 1819.
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