Corsetry and Stay Making | Dying Arts #11

For this week's bonus episode, Eleanor trims her baleen into lengths, finds our natural waists, and loosens the laces of underwear history to explain the rich heritage of Corsetry and Stay Making!

Part of the "Dying Arts" series, we start by discussing the basics of what corsets and stays even are before we whisk back to Ancient Greece, Rome and Egypt to explore how ladies' underwear used to work, and how it has then changed and developed across the centuries.

From the Middle Ages into the Renaissance, the Romantic and Victorian eras through to the modern day, it's a story as much about how expectations around the female body and shifts in fashion changed underwear across time, including through some surprising feats of engineering, the use of materials ranging from whale keratin to steel, linen to silk, and the rather late development of the waist-constricting fashions so commonly associated with corsets today.

Encompassing some wild ideas, including the 'Pigeon Bras' worn by soldiers in World War 2 to the historic undergarments worn by ancient royal effigies, myths about measurements, examples of Victorian image manipulation and misleading portraiture designed to portray 'perfect' bodies, it's an episode filled with surprises, and one that explores how marriages of form and function have worked brilliantly for centuries - while certain innovations have prompted wide-scale protests, 'bra burnings', and a modern tendency to sideline clothing items deemed essential by generations of women from the dawn of recorded history...

About Three Ravens 🔮

Three Ravens is a completely independent English myth and folklore podcast where we share stories, celebrate folk culture, and fall backwards through the hedgerows of history.

Hosted by real-life couple Eleanor Conlon and Martin Vaux, and mostly recorded at our home in rural Sussex in southern England, Three Ravens is rated 4.8/5 from over 500 reviews and has grown by word of mouth care of our lovely listener community ‘The Conspiracy of Ravens.’

We release three episodes a week, on Mondays, Thursday and Saturdays, through which we explore folktales, folkways, fairy stories, folk songs, mythology, local heritage, seasonal customs and traditional beliefs.

Our research inspires our retellings of stories from across history and culture, with episodes standing alone but connected together across over 500 chatty, mostly light-hearted, swear-free installments driven by passion, kindness and curiosity.

Now ranked as an all-time Top 5 podcast across several categories by Goodpods, charting in the Spotify, Apple and Rephonic UK Fiction Top 10 across 2024, 2025 and 2026, if you’re interested in ghosts, monsters, regional beliefs, and the things that unite us all, then join us round the campfire and listen in…

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