Where are the girdles of yesteryear? The ones women of all ages once wore as a matter of course, huffing and puffing as they tugged at the reinforced elastic and lace, the better to encase their bodies to trimmest effect. The ones that were so pivotal that the 19th-century sexologist Havelock Ellis felt compelled to weigh in, insisting that girdles were “morphologically essential” because the evolution from “horizontality to verticality” was more difficult for women than for men. (Without them,...
