the downward pull of the hose supporters, which vainly endeavored to hold the wrongly cut corset in a position which should suppress the abdomen. Illustration 5 shows the actual results of tight waisted corsets with hose supporters attached, and this is the reason for the bad reputation given to hose supporters on corsets by the physiological critics.
The function of the hose supporter should not be to fix the position of a corset which otherwise slips out of place on the body, but to support the stockings in order to do away with round garters, which impede the circulation. The correctly cut corset assumes and holds the right position on the body whether hose supporters be fastened or not.
Next in chronological sequence there emanated from the workshops of fashion an idea new to our day and generation—the "straight front" corset, a picture of which appeared, direct from Paris, as in illustration 6. This corset threw the balanced weight of the body forward, curved the spine abnormally and produced what was known to fashion authorities as the "Paquin slant," to joke writers and cartoonists, the "kangaroo shape." This designation is also used by orthopedic specialists in describing this particular phase of incorrect body balance.
It is a significant fact that the avowed purpose of all fashionable corsets always has been to reduce the woman's body somewhere, as though normal physical development were Nature's mistake, which we must perforce correct; therefore, we have been importuned in turn by the makers of "waist reducing" corsets, "abdominal reducing" corsets, and then "hip reducing" corsets. The object of the straight front corset was the complete obliteration of the roundness of the abdomen, and incidentally to provide a place where the fashionable belt or girdle could be extended in a point, it seemed indefinitely, making the body of a short, stout woman appear at least half waist.
Never has the designer of fashionable corsets taken into consideration the physiological fact that constriction of the flesh of the body around one portion will result in an increase at the points where pressure ceases; hence the bulging shoulder flesh and the protruding abdomen of the waist constricting corset, and the widening thigh muscles of the flat hip corset of the present mode. In the wearing of the first straight front corsets, which flattened the abdomen abnormally, women with full abdomens
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