I'm a massive historical fashion nerd. I love historical fashion in almost all it's forms (the 1830s were... a thing), and one of the aspects of being a huge lover of historical fashion is learning a lot about corsets. I also started wearing corsets about 8 years ago now. So, I figure I might as well share some of the things I know so that if anyone femme presenting wants to wear one, they'll know enough to be safe and smart about it!

History You Should Know: Corsets are not a patriarchal torture device, it is the ancestor to the bra. It does not damage your internal organs (when worn safely, obviously) and you don't need ribs removed to wear them. When they were more commonly worn as undergarments, they were there to support the often huge amounts of heavy skirts women wore. A corset evenly distributed the weight of those skirts along the torso instead of letting all the weight sit on the waist which, if you've worn a long, heavy skirt for a long period of time before, you'll know gets very exhausting and annoying after a while.

Rule #1: Where You Buy From Matters - Don't buy from online retailers like Amazon, because the 'corsets' they offer are poorly made and unsafe. Why? A proper corset is made with curved panels, which is what gives a corset it's shape and makes it easier/safer to wear, and spiral steel boning. 'Corsets' from Amazon, however, are made using straight, narrow panels that have little to no ease for the ribs and hips, which puts pressure all over the torso and can cause pain to the wearer, and cheap plastic boning. The spiral steel boning used in real corsets is also safer than the cheap plastic boning used in 'corsets', because sprial steel isn't likely to snap and stab you like the cheap plastic boning in 'corsets'.

Rule #2: Measure Yourself For A Proper Fit - Once you've found an established corset retailer (or even a full on corsetier), you need to take some measurements: your bust, underbust, waist, upper hip, and the length of your abdomen while sitting. There are tutorials on how to do this, but I'll still explain here, using my measurements as examples. My bust measurement is 40in (taken around the fullest part of the bust). My underbust is 36in. My waist is 30~33in (depending on bloat). And my upper hip (just below bellybotton) is 38in. And the length of my seated abdomen is ~10in (this measurement is from the fold under the breast down to the crease where yout thigh meets your abdomen while sitting). The bust measurement only matters if you plan on buying an overbust corset, and your abdominal measurement helps you decide whether you need a longline, regular, or wasp length corset (ie, tall (10in>), regular (10in=), short (10in<)).

Rule #3: Wear A Layer Beneath It - To protect your skin from rubbing, chafing, and rashes, you really really need to wear a layer beneath a corset. Not only will it protect your skin, it will also protect the corset itself from being damaged by the oils in your skin. It will also help with the sweatiness to a degree!

Rule #4: Seasoning - To get a properly fitted corset, not only do you need it to be the right size, but it also needs to be comfortable. A corset should feel like a firm hug. Not a firm hug from a boa constrictor, mind you, but more of a firm hug from a beloved family member/friend that you could endure for a long period of time and kinda miss it when it ends. To get there, you gotta season your corset. Seasoning is the act of wearing your corset for a few hours at a time every so often so that the spiral steel can gradually form to the contours of your body. Like I mentioned previously, a majority of the shape a corset has comes from the way the panels are cut; but the boning is still at least somewhat vital to the way a corset looks. Once it's seasoned to your body, the boning will want to stay in the shape of your body even when it's hanging in the closet. This takes time, but makes for a much more comfortable wear that allows you to wear it for longer.

Rule #5: Tightlacing Takes TIME - So this one is a bit more controversial, to be honest. See, tightlacing, or the act of tightening a corset as tight as possible to achieve the smallest possible waist measurement, has actually always been a very niche, rare thing, even when corsets were a much more common udergarment. A lot of the pictures we see of it are altered (aka, photoshopped) to make the woman's waist look even smaller than it actually was. It was also much more common an activity among the rich, because they could afford to be so heavily inconvenienced by their clothing and liked to show that off (this is also why so many rich women's portraits has them wearing ridiculously long skirts, it was a whole thing). If you do want to have an extremely tiny waist, you cannot and SHOULD NOT try to do it right away. You must always always ALWAYS season your corset first. After that, you can VERY SLOWLY begin tightening your corset tighter. This process takes years because not only do you need to slowly introduce the tighter fit to your body, but you need to replace your corset every so often to get even smaller (at least until you mean your goal measurement). No one recommends you tightlace, because that is one of the ways in which you CAN injure yourself in a corset.

Rule #6: It Might Not Work How You Want It To - Something that NEEDS to be said is that not everyone will get more than 2 inches of waist reduction. The amount of waist reduction you get from your corset depends on your body and whether or not you have enough 'squish' for more than that. The term 'squish' has nothing to do with being fat or thin, it literally just refers to whether or not your body is too firm for a corset to reduce your waist measurement beyond 2 inches. This has very little to do with assigned sex or anything like that, by the way, it's just a sort of "luck of the draw" situation. It also depends on the style of corset you buy! For example, in a brocade corset, I can only reduce my waist from 33in to about 30in; but in a mesh summer corset, I can reduce it down to 28in. I have a fairly average amount of squish. Furthermore, a lot of the women who looked like their waists were impossibly small in a corset back in Ye Olden Days used padding on their hips and busts to exaggerate that illusion (the cut and prints of their clothes helped with this, too), while having waist reductions of only 2 or 3 inches!

Please ask me anything you like, and while I may not know everything, I'd be happy to answer whatever I can!