1900-1910 Ribbon corset

1905 The Metropolitan Museum of Art

I fell in love with this ribbon corset from 1900-1910 some time ago. The Metropolitan Museum of Art owns some very beautiful specimens.

Since I never saw or have sewn a pattern anything like it, I started with gathering some information. For historical patterns I can only reccomend Atelier Sylphe. The proprietor is buying original historical corsets and takes the pattern from them. She then sells them with different sizes.

In this case she didn’t have a pattern for me, but she kindly recommended me the following book: Corsets: Historic Patterns and Techniques
In there there are the pattern for the ribbon corset and 21 additional patterns. It is one of the best books of this kind I currently own. It is very well-arranged and still has a lot of information. Every corsets is photographed, with that comes a description, a technical drawing and the pattern itself.

In the end I only let myself be inspired by the pattern, since it had too many small pieces for my taste. I wanted to have the ribbons in one piece and in the original they are made of two pieces each. So I used an old dressmaker’s trick, namely wrapping my mannequin in wrapping film, strenghtend it with parcel tape and then I drew the corset on it. Now I could simply cut out my pattern pieces. This worked very well, yet the current version can’t be laced down very tightly. I’ll have to work on that again.

And like this this ribbon corset made from sand coloured, fake suede – as always lined with coutil – was made. Incidentally it is part of the Khaleesi / Daenerys Targaryen cosplay. I will show the complete outfit soon.