Corseting Respectability

This article examines the corset as a racialized system of expertise, access, and bodily discipline during the Jim Crow era in the United States. Rather than treating corsetry as a fashion object, it argues that corsets functioned as an infrastructure through which racial segregation manifested its way in production, retail, and fitting practices. Drawing on industry marketing, department store policies, and the Black press, this article demonstrates how white women’s bodies were standardized as the normative basis of corset design and fitting expertise, while Black women were systematically excluded from professional training and retail services even as they were actively targeted as consumers. By foregrounding the alternative infrastructures that Black women developed in response to these exclusions, the article reframes corsetry as a site where racial inequality was negotiated, contested, and materially enforced through intimate consumer practices.