Metal corset
[2][3][4] The 16th-century French army surgeon Ambroise Paré described metal corsets as intended "to amend the crookednesse of the Bodie," recommending that the iron should be perforated in order to make the garments lighter, and that they be made to fit and padded for comfort.
[2] A steel corset in the Stibbert Museum, Florence, Italy, is dated to the mid-16th century, and thought to be similar to the metal stays recorded as having been made by a corazzaio mastro (master armour-maker) for Eleanor of Toledo, and delivered to her on 28 February 1549.
[5] However, as Eleanor's wardrobe records do not list any boned or stiffened corsets, it is thought that her steel bodice was designed for medical or therapeutic reasons rather than worn as a fashionable garment.
[1] One such iron corset, with a 14 in (360 mm) waist, was acquired by the Fashion Institute of Technology Museum and described as dating from 1580–1600, but is now considered to be a forgery from the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.
[2] Harold Koda, the former curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute, states that the excessive, mechanically produced regularity of the garment's structure is evidence for its being a 19th-century fabrication.
[6] Koda's take on the significant percentage of extant 19th-century metal corsets made in emulation of purported 16th-century models is that they were created to cater to a specialist market, perhaps for inclusion in collector's cabinets.
[8] In Fashion and Fetishism, David Kunzle noted that in Peter Rondeau's 1739 French-German dictionary, the French term corps de fer is explained in German as Schnürburst, mit kleinen eisernen blechen, für übel gewachsenes Frauenzimmer ("A bodice, with small iron plates, for badly grown [i.e., deformed] girls").
[2] In 1894, A.M. Phelps of the American Orthopaedic Association recommended an aluminium corset coated with waterproof enamel for sufferers of Pott disease or curvature of the spine.
The Mexican painter Frida Kahlo was a notable wearer of such medical corsets, following ongoing problems as a result of a serious road crash she experienced as a teenager.
[16] In the painting, Kahlo portrays herself weeping with agony, her torso split open revealing that her spine is a crumbling Ionic column, and her damaged body held together by the steel corset.
[5][23] The Victoria and Albert Museum in London describes an iron corset in their collection (formerly owned by the painter Talbot Hughes) as dating from the 18th century and likely intended for orthopaedic purposes.
