The Victorian corset was not merely a symbol of fashionable constraint; it was also one of the early mass-produced garments of the industrial age. By the 19th century, corset manufacturing had adopted assembly-line methods in which separate groups performed highly specialized tasks. Workers cut fabric, prepared the steel boning, sewed channels, inserted ribs, and finished the lacing systems. The work was divided along gendered lines: heavy or dirty operations, including cutting and japanning steel to resist rust, were often performed in factories, while lighter sewing and bone-insertion tasks were taken home by pieceworkers, predominantly women. These women frequently enlisted their own children to help complete the quantities required for payment.
The labor conditions were especially severe in London, where corset-factory workers were described as among the city's poorest paid. Many could not earn enough to cover their daily living expenses, despite producing garments marketed as instruments of refinement, respectability, and elite feminine beauty. The contradiction was stark: the fashionable hourglass silhouette depended on increasingly sophisticated steel eyelets, boning, and steam-moulded construction, while the people assembling those components remained trapped in precarious factory and domestic piecework. The corset industry's history therefore links the polished Victorian ideal of the tiny waist to an early form of industrial garment exploitation that foreshadowed later sweatshop systems.
