Business & Finance: Snug Corsets

Parading before a small army of men and women across the roof ballroom of Manhattan’s respectable Hotel McAlpin last week were dozens of smiling young women who wore no dresses, no slips, not a stitch of clothing that anyone could see except a corset and a pair of stockings. Yet the hotel manager was not disturbed and no guest complained at the exhibition.

It was the 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 promised to keep their prices on quality lines stable, if the retailers would do the same. They even designated how much profit the retailer should make—sometimes as high as 50%. Result was that, while other members of the clothing industry were foundering 1 the red-ink bog, the corset and brassiere makers marched quietly along at an amazingly stable pace.

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 80,000,000.

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.

The 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 Pariscouturiers, sick of the tube dress, came to their rescue by raising the waistline, dropping the skirt. “Foundation garments” became a practical necessity. The corset-makers frankly admitted for the first time that women had not one bust but two breasts. Even then corsets were relatively clumsy affairs with elastic threads woven to stretch only in one direction. The elastic lost its snap if a corset lay on a store shelf for any length of time. Perspiration and a few washings had the same effect.

Corsets: New Style. The most historic corset year of modern times was 1931. On Oct. 1 Warner Bros., which was celebrating its 55th year, launched an advertising campaign featuring the “Youthlastic” corset which would stretch two ways and was made of Lastex. Next day, Oct. 2, the famed firm of Kops & Co. exhibited a similar garment. Few months later a third company, H. & W., brought forth another Lastex corset. Each had worked independently during the summer without knowing what the others were doing. But the combined effect was revolutionary.

Lastex and the two-way stretch are not the same thing though they were launched simultaneously. The two-way stretch is purely a matter of weaving elastic threads up & down and across the corset so that the garment “gives” with every movement of the body. Lastex, made of latex, the pure essence of rubber and tougher than its compounds, was more practical than the old rubber because it did not lose its elasticity despite long wear and frequent laundering. Thus the two-way stretch allowed corseted women to move about with freedom; the Lastex, carefully moulding the figure, kept the corset fitted snugly to the body.

Last week no depressing seasonal valleys, no troublesome style changes marred the corset curve. Warner Brothers’ Chairman DeVer Howard, 65, son of the elder of the two founders, stayed in Bridgeport busily manufacturing. But proudly walking around the Warner Bros, showroom was the son of the other founder, shrewd, kindly Lucien Thompson Warner, 52, who was last year selected by his colleagues to head the committee which codified corsets, seventh industry to come under the NRA. And busy in their own showrooms chatting with buyers were the proprietors of many another corset company whose name is familiar to U. S. women—Kops, H. & W., I. Newman, Formfit, Gossard. Lily of France. All agreed that corsets this year will have few bones, that 60% will be two-way stretch, and the other 40% will go around the girths of women who are set in their ways. Only cause for excitement this year was a little flurry over the molding of the breast. Many breast lines tended to be smooth and rounded, but on the Pacific Coast the Hollywood influence was still dictating “points.”