Los Angeles Daily Herald

Stories of New York

There is in one of the corset manufactories a little blonde-haired woman who has for years made a specialty of men's corsets, and has established an extensive business in a Western city. She had a man trained to take the measures and fit the corsets, and frequently she, or her forewoman, never saw the customers for whom they made corsets regularly.

It is very paying business, for men rarely question the price of an article they wish to purchase, and men's corsets are always made to order and never kept in stock. A woman the shape of a tub and a woman the shape of a broomstick will buy the same make of corsets in different sizes, and somehow fit herself into them; but if a man wants a corset at all he wants it to fit, and the cheapest ones made to order cost $10.

They do not differ materially from a woman's corset in construction, being made of the same material, only with heavier bones and stronger steels. They differ very materially in shape, however, being shorter and nearly straight up and down, though the constant wearing of corsets conduces to added fullness of chest, which compensates for the pretty bust curves and slope in a woman's waist. They are usually made of gray sateen or coutil, but occasionally a very fastidious customer is found who orders the daintiest of materials and decorations.

One of the lady's customers always wore satin corsets of a delicate color, fossed and laced with silk. He was very stout, and broke a great many of the silk laces, which a woman will wear almost a year without breaking. One of his latest orders is a Nile-green satin corset fossed and laced with cardinal silk and trimmed at the top and bottom with fine white lace, for which he paid $25, no demur.

Another customer was so extremely modest that he never went into the store, but his wife took his measure and ordered the corsets, fitting them on herself when they were finished. It requires three visits to insure a perfect-fitting corset—one for the measure, which is taken very carefully; one for the fitting, when only half the bones are in and the steels basted in place, and one for the final examination, when everything is finished.

After one perfectly-fitting corset has been made, however, only one fitting is required.

CORSETS ARE WORN MORE BY ACTORS, the fit of whose garments furnish at present a large proportion of their stock in trade. Then there are clerks who sit bending over desks all day and half the night, to whom corsets are frequently recommended by their physicians as a help toward straightening their curved spines, men who from some injury or physical imperfections are obliged to wear them, and a fair percentage of dudes who rejoice in a small waist and a smoothly fitting coat.

An ambitious cutter in one of the swell establishments, where a suit of clothes may be purchased for the price of a brown-stone block, has an idea of winning an heiress for his wife at some popular summer resort where he spends his vacations, and accordingly arrays himself in all the elegance the establishment affords, hooks himself into a double-boned corset, and lays siege to the hearts of the fair ones. Before he adopted the corset, he buckled a broad belt of heavy leather about his body at the waist, but as he grew stout this expedient lost its efficacy.

A man's corsets are as readily detected by his fellow-men as the faintest touch of rouge on a woman's face is always discovered by her sister woman. Gentlemen say that a man in corsets gets upstairs like a woman and walks differently, and that if you observe him closely for a few minutes he will give a little peculiar hitch to his shoulders, as if he were endeavoring to pull himself up out of the corsets. It was by watching Barry Wall mounting a flight of stairs that it was fully determined that he was laced into a snugly fitting corset. His wife accompanied him, and they made the same motions in the ascent.

Both the king dude and his rolly-polly little chum wore corsets regularly on important occasions. It was at Mme. Griswald's, on Broadway, that the pink-haired dude returned a pair of baby blue satin corsets, trimmed with lace, after they had been fitted three times, to have them made half an inch smaller, and his anxious perplexity was very amusing to the mischievous, merry maiden who fitted them on.

It is no secret that Osmond Tearle wore corsets, and that Kyrle Bellew wears them still. The noble Antony has them made in London, in a little shop in Conduit street. They are not trimmed with pink lace or embellished with embroidery, which is the only surprising thing about them, but they are deliciously small and very short, not more than six or eight inches up and down.

In the same shop the Duke of Beaufort has the pink satin, laced-edged corsets, which he makes no secret of wearing, manufactured and embroidered with his monogram, surmounted by a ducal coronet. He is an old decrepit man, with a wrinkled yellow face, and a fringe of white whiskers, and so bent over with age that the line of his corsets is plainly discernible through his dress coat. It is said that the Prince of Wales affects them, too, and that is why he has abandoned horseback riding. Corsets are worn quite extensively by men in Paris, and all the handsome officers in the German army wear corsets under their uniforms.

Though corsets are worn by men in New York it is extremely difficult to find out where they are made. There is no special manufactory for them, and though most of the first-class corset places receive orders for them occasionally, they are very reticent on the subject, for any publicity given to the fact would destroy the business altogether. There is one bright woman corset-maker on Fourteenth street who advertises to make a specialty of men's corsets and receives a great many orders, which she fills simply by taking women's corsets of large size and removing the gores in the bust and taking out some of the fullness at the hips.

Merchant tailors would hail with delight the general use of corsets, as they would render the fitting of garments much easier, and enable them to keep smooth and in shape much longer. It is the stout men who take to them most kindly and who suffer most by wearing them, and it is hinted that two of the handsomest "dress-coat actors" in New York resort to their use on the stage.

Watch the man who never leans back comfortably in his chair, whose coat does not pull in lines at every button, or gradually work up to his shoulders, and whose chest is unusually round and full, and if he seems at intervals to be pulling himself up out of his garments by the shoulders and goes upstairs with an inflexible back, you may safely infer that he is laced into a pair of $10 stays, though he wouldn't admit it any sooner than a woman would own her stays.

"A man cares more about his shape than a woman," said a corset-maker, "and will resort to more stringent and uncomfortable measures to improve his figure."—[Exchange.]