There’s a scene in the recent film Corsage in which Vicky Krieps, playing the melancholy anorexic Empress Elisabeth of Austria, has a strop with her maid. As part of the arduous process of getting dressed, she must be encased in an impossibly small corset (the real Empress reportedly had a waist of 16 inches). Krieps snaps at the maid who cannot lace her tightly enough and demands someone else pull the strings to impose such waspish proportions.
Watching the scene, you’d be forgiven for thinking that such restrictive undergarments were normal for high-class women in the 18th and 19th centuries – and therefore expected for any female actor in a period drama. The myths of women swooning from lack of oxygen have taken on a whole history of their own.
Krieps described how her corset plunged her into ‘deep sadness’, while Simone Ashley – who played Kate Sharma in the second series of Bridgerton – said her costume stopped her from eating and moving.
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