Word: corset
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...semi-annual fashion show of corset manufacturers, and every U. S. department store had a special reason for making sure that its buyer got to the McAlpin and to the dozens of other private corset exhibits in Manhattan. Corsets are today the best paying department in nearly every biggish store. No matter how much he may lose on his dresses or his stockings through price-cutting and competition, the store manager can count on a snug income from corsets. Early in Depression he was persuaded by the corset-makers, a shrewd and clannish lot, to protect the corset. The manufacturers...
Every year for more than a decade they have grossed an average of $75,000,000. They took in exactly $75,000,000 in 1919. Eight years later when waistlines were low and the tube dress and boyish ngun seemed to have eliminated the corset tor ever, the total gross was $77,000,000. And so much has happened to corsets in the last three years that corset men are willing to estimate 1934 gross sales at near...
...Corsets: Old Style. The Florodora girls were but babies when the U. S. corset industry began. For practical purposes the date is 1874. That year two specialists in women's diseases, the Brothers Ira DeVer and Lucien C. Warner, rented a wooden house in Cortland, N. Y., hired some girls to make "health"' corsets. Two years later they opened a factory in Bridgeport. By 1880 their corset business was so prosperous that they quit the medical profession, moved to Bridgeport...
Prime problem in corset making when the Brothers Warner went into it was boning. Whalebones were expensive. Horn was brittle. Iron and steel bones rusted so quickly that one or two washings made the corset as ugly as it was uncomfortable. So in 1894 the Warner Brothers, working with Worcester's American Steel & Wire Co. (now part of U. S. Steel), presented the rustproof steel corset rib. It revolutionized the boning business, made whale-bones obsolete...
...first suggestion of comfort came in 1907 when corset-makers hit upon the idea of "anchoring" the corset to the stocking by means of the hose supporter. With little change the corset pinched and pressed its way through the War into the "corsetless era," which was not corsetless at all. It was the age of the girdle. Millions of stout women kept on buying corsets. The slimmer ones took to the girdle. When the word corset became unpopular, corset-makers shrewdly substituted the "foundation garment." At the beginning of Depression the Paris couturiers, sick of the tube dress, came...