All posts tagged: terminology

Swiss waist, waist cincher, corset, and corselet: what’s the difference?

For this week’s terminology post I go back to last week’s Rate the Dress, and Rae’s comment about whether Victorian women wore corsets outside of their dresses. The simple answer is, they didn’t. But they did wear Swiss waists & corselets outside of their dresses, and these can look a lot like corsets if you don’t look closely. So what are these things, and how are they different from corsets? A Swiss waist is a boned, pointed underbust garment worn over skirts and blouses or dresses. Unlike a corset, a swiss waist NEVER fastens with a metal front busk. Swiss waists can have a flat front, with no front opening, or can lace up the front with hand worked eyelets (never metal eyelets). The backs fasten with lacing (also with worked eyelets, not metal eyelets) or buttons. Swiss waists were extremely popular in the 1860s, worn by empresses and common women alike. In the 1860s they were more likely to be called corsages (an un-specific term for a bodice), swiss bodices, swiss belts, or swiss …

Terminology: What is a tea gown?

Published by The Dreamstress

I just finished (well, soft finished – I still want to go back and do some unpicking and improving) a ca. 1900 tea gown. I’ll be telling you all about the process of making shortly, but first I want to start where I started when I began researching tea gowns: with the question, what exactly is a tea gown? How can you tell if a garment is a tea gown, rather than say, a wrapper or an afternoon dress? For a general idea, let’s start with Emily Post: Every one knows that a tea-gown is a hybrid between a wrapper and a ball dress. It has always a train and usually long flowing sleeves; is made of rather gorgeous materials and goes on easily, and its chief use is not for wear at the tea-table so much as for dinner alone with one’s family. It can, however, very properly be put on for tea, and if one is dining at home, kept on for dinner. Otherwise a lady is apt to take tea in whatever …

Terminology: When a corsage wasn’t flowers

Published by The Dreamstress

Today a corsage is a small bouquet of flowers pinned to your bodice or worn on your wrist, but that hasn’t always been what a corsage is. Corsage used to be a term for a bodice. Via VintageVictorian.com While a small bouquet of flowers and a blouse may seem like very different things, the terms are actually related. Women used to gather a small nosegay of flowers to wear on their bodice, or their gentlemen admirers would send them small bouquets to be worn to an event. These nosegays were called ‘corsages’ (basically a shortening of ‘corsage bouquet’) because they were specifically meant to be worn on a woman’s corsage. In the same way, men would wear flowers in their buttonholes, and these were (and still are, in the UK and a few other places) called ‘buttonholes’ though the name didn’t stick as well in America, and today they are more likely to call them boutonnieres (which is just French for buttonhole). The term ‘corsage’ comes from the French cors, or body, and thus has …