Content Note: This article contains brief mention of disordered eating.

With the grand return of Bridgerton for Season 2, so returns a series of stolen glances, classical re-imaginings of our favourite pop songs, and plenty of corsets. Discussing her experiences with the prolific undergarment this season, leading lady Simone Ashley told Glamour magazine that she could barely eat whilst wearing one, especially during busy days on set. She even recalled struggling to film some of the season’s more intimate scenes, finding the corset so restrictively painful that she tore her shoulder.

“Is Bridgerton lacking appropriate costume design, or simply proper corset training for its actors?”

Naturally, every other fashion magazine started spewing nonsense about the dangers of corsets, how strong women must have been to wear them, and how thankful we should be that we’re free from their constraints today. And yet, I’m still struggling to make sense of it. If you’ve watched any Regency dramas, you’ve probably got a vague idea of how the dresses of the time were structured: long skirts, puffy sleeves, and an empire waistline right up to your bosom. No one could make out the shape of your real waist at all. So why, dear reader, was Simone Ashley’s corset laced up so tightly around her stomach that she could barely consume a morsel?

Frustratingly, the show’s second season perpetuated the same anachronistic lies that it did in Season 1. In the infamous opening scene, Prudence Featherington clings onto a chair for dear life, gasping for air as her mother insists she could squeeze her waist into the size of an orange and a half at her age. Skip forward a couple of minutes and suddenly Prudence reappears, dress on and her waist shape completely disguised by her gown, making the whole painful endeavour laughably fruitless. In reality, most women during the Regency Era wore short stays, rather than the long stays we see in the show. They were made of linen and rarely had any boning. All in all, they were barely different (and no more uncomfortable) than a modern push-up bra, which could have easily been used in Bridgerton to achieve the same silhouette.

“All in all, [corsets] were barely different (and no more uncomfortable) than a modern push-up bra”

Thankfully, this season didn’t see the return of the angry red marks on Daphne’s back. And, of course, to the dismay of fashion historians everywhere, she would have been badly bruised there too, seeing as she wasn’t wearing a shift. A shift was a simple linen garment that you would put on before your corset or stays to protect the skin underneath, preventing any potential chafing. And for some reason (most likely their complete and utter lack of sex appeal), they are entirely non-existent in almost every period drama I’ve ever seen.

The truth is, the women of the past shouldn’t be placed on some pedestal for enduring these so-called patriarchal torture devices. In the days before fast fashion, poor quality clothing, and the ever confusing mystery as to how one person can be five different sizes at three different brands, everything was tailored to fit perfectly. Especially corsets. Rather worryingly, Bridgerton costume designer Ellen Mirojnick recently told Refinery 29 that “a corset will never be truly comfortable.” Except they can be, and they were. In fairness, the people of the time were used to them. They wore them every day and were adapted to the more tight-fitting, rigidly structured layers of Regency dress. So is Bridgerton lacking appropriate costume design, or simply proper corset training for its actors?

Yet Bridgerton isn’t the only guilty suspect. From Lily James in Cinderella to Emma Stone in The Favourite, there have been countless complaints from suffering stars both on and off screen. In Pirates of the Caribbean, for example, we see Elizabeth Swann’s corset subdue her to a swoon into the sea, with Jack Sparrow emancipating her from the trappings of the male gaze as he cuts it free from her body. A mystery more scandalous than Lady Whistledown herself, there appears to be some strange obsession in Hollywood with corsets as a symbol of patriarchal constraint. Maybe it’s to make ourselves feel better about our own day and age – a look at how far we’ve come from the imagined “horrors” of the past.

Of course, corsets did cause problems when they were pushed to their extremes. The dress reform of the late nineteenth century didn’t happen for nothing, but it was only in the wasp-waist era of the 1850-80s that tight-lacing and its health impacts really became an issue. It’s no wonder that when doctors became concerned by the effects of this type of waist-training, fashion moved on to the slightly more relaxed silhouettes of the Edwardian Gibson Girl and the 1920s Flapper. Yet looking at the history of the corset in its entirety, starting with its first appearance in the sixteenth century, it was only in its later years that the corset caused any serious harm. Women wouldn’t have worn corsets for centuries if they physically couldn’t eat or breathe in them – we didn’t have much freedom, but we did have some. And even if a film does require a more daring silhouette, surely modern movie magic could create the illusion of one without all the torn shoulders and liquid diets.

So why do we insist that Disney princesses suffer in lung-tightening shapewear? Or believe that Georgian dramas need duchesses with their breasts (anachronistically) bursting out of their bodices? Maybe these air-restricting corsets say more about our modern beauty standards than the ideals of the past. It is not corsets that are damaging to women’s bodies, but our own 21st-century expectations.