The structured corset was a part of dress for most women in the 19th century. However, throughout the century quite a couple distinct groups fought against them, for three primary reasons: health, practicality, and aesthetic. These movements to reform women’s dress focused on corsets, but extended to other issues in fashion, either due to similar health concerns or aesthetics.

Women’s rights activists were significant in dress reform. The expectation of the corset and long trailing skirt was seen as a safety hazard, but also as limiting in women’s ability to achieve serious business practically and comfortably. In 1851, the Lily, an early suffragist and temperance newspaper, began reporting on and encouraging a new style of dress, which would become known as the bloomer costume, after Lily journalist Amelia Bloomer.

The bloomer costume consisted of a shortened dress, with pants underneath (typically gathered at the cuff, also sometimes referred to as turkish trousers). Most notably–it was designed to be worn without a corset. The bloomer costume was fairly short-lived, mostly because it simply failed to enter the mainstream. Some women did adopt it, but they were in the minority and faced significant backlash from the general public for wearing the costume. It never became fashionable, primarily because it was never intended to be fashionable, but rather a practical solution to a problem that women could solve easily at home.

Some dedicated feminist dress reformers did continue to wear the costume. However, early adopters such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton abandoned the bloomer costume, primarily because it was a major detractor from other issues, such as temperance and accomplishing political equality.

While the bloomer costume may have been largely abandoned, the issues integral to the arguments of feminists against women’s popular fashion persisted. Artistic dress reform, driven primarily by members of either the arts and crafts, aesthetic or pre-raphaelite movements, focused both on health and on the aesthetic value of popular dress as a whole. Artistic dress reformers argued against aspects of both men’s and women’s popular fashion, primarily based on a lack of “picturesque-ness.” They expounded on their own opinions towards popular design in Aglaia: the journal of the Health and Artistic Dress Union, which, though it only published three issues between 1893-94, provides a fairly clear picture of their issues with their contemporary dress–primarily a lack of beauty, romance, picturesqueness.

Walter Crane, writer for the Aglaia and socialist assigned this lack of beauty to the fact “we allow ourselves to destroy [beauty’s] sources in nature, in the beauty of our own land, by ruthless destruction or vulgarization”, a fundamental issue in society as a whole, rather than solely in the taste of individuals. Interestingly, this tying fashion back to an issue the observer sees in society is also the basis for the rational dress reform movement. Artistic dress designs were not, for the most part, utilitarian. They were based on design principles and inspired by both the classic Greeks and the Middle Ages.

Perhaps most importantly, artistic dress was high fashion, rather than something made at home (or ordered from a hospital, like many rational dress undergarments). Liberty & Co, and their designer Edward W. Godwin produced elaborate dresses, which could be worn without a corset. Many of these were tea gowns, which were meant for less formal occasions, and featured picturesque embroidery and smocking.

The ultimate end of the corset was simply the tide of popular fashion turning to obscure it from expectation. That isn’t to say that nobody wore corsets after they went somewhat out of fashion during the first world war–corsets are still worn today–but it is to say that popular fashion shifting towards a silhouette which allowed the wearer to choose, rather than one which forced the wearer into a specific undergarment, meant that women could make that choice.

And most women did choose, eventually, to allow the corset to continue to languish in obscurity. The dress reformers of the 1850s were correct in their estimation that many would depend on popular fashion before making decisions for themselves, but they were also correct in their estimation that the corset and trailing skirt were simply not feasible or comfortable for most women. These objects teach an interesting lesson in change through fashion. Sometimes the mainstream simply has to wait–or have a more attractive alternative.