Foundations Revealed

The first thing I did to test the pattern was to cut the pieces from the patent diagram and connect them to see how they worked together. They didn’t.  

Monsieur Savoye apparently forgot to pattern the center front part of the top piece and the point at the bottom of the center front, also alignment point 6 on piece A didn’t come close to alignment mark 6 on piece B.

There was no way to know why the pattern was incorrect but once I filled in the gaps I could begin to see Savoye’s one-of-a-kind corset. 

Viewed from the side, the center back had an extremely sharp angle at the waist, but this version was paper on wood, not fabric on a person, so I wasn’t terribly discouraged.

Patent applicants did not have to prove that their inventions worked, only that they were new and unique, so Savoye did not have to present the Patent Office with a finished corset, just the schematics for his design. It’s not surprising that a civil servant at Patent Office didn’t notice that the pattern was off, but it is surprising that Savoye didn’t catch the mistake himself. He was more than just a guy with some new ideas about foundation garments, after all: he was an very experienced corset maker. His company, Savoye-Deglaire et Fils, was founded in 1866, and although his shop was in Paris, privileged ladies in the United States could purchase his corsets under the Pansy, and later the Fasso, name.

In 1886 department store B. Altman & Co. announced they were the exclusive importer of the “Fasso corset, for many years sold as the Pansy.”  In 1888 B. Altman named the Fasso brand corset manufacturer as “the celebrated Paris maker, Savoye-Deglaire,” and the Savoye-Deglaire trademark is so important that it is shown twice in this ad. 

The same mark is used 17 years later in a 1905 Savoye-Deglaire et Fils advertisement placed in Dessous Elegants.

By the time Savoye submitted the application for his 1904 design he was a member of the Chambre Syndicale de Corsets et Fournitures, and in 1905 he served as secretary of that organization, so he knew his stuff.

To verify that Emile Savoye the patent holder was the same man who owned Savoye-Deglaire corsets I checked the address listed on the patents against the address of the shop in the 1905 advertisement. They were the same, 35 Rue de Caire, Paris. I was in good hands, and I was confident that Savoye’s design would work.

I enlarged the diagram on a copy machine until it filled a single page.

Then I enlarged piece C so it filled a page, and continued enlarging with the goal of getting the piece to fit more or less over my hip.

I wrote down the enlargement percentages each time and enlarged the other two pieces the same way.

I had no idea what size corset this workable pattern would make and was pleased with how well the mock up fit.

It was too long above the bust, there was excess fabric at the top center back, and the hips were loose, but clearly the pattern functioned.

I pinned the excess fabric away.

Sure, the fabric was now snug against my body, but it didn’t look right.  I’d lost the pleasing proportions of Savoy’s design. It occurred to me that I was not working with the pattern as Savoye intended.

I shouldn’t be lopping off excess length and making huge darts. I needed to alter the fit by working with the two seams that wrapped around the body. Also, eyeballing the missing part of piece A got me this far, but I had to be more precise. Currently the bust was pressed flat and pushed up and I imagined if I cinched a corset built like the mock up I’d look as though I were wearing 18^thcentury stays. Not exactly an Edwardian silhouette.

To fill in the blank part of piece A accurately, I studied the drawings from another Savoy patent. In 1905 he submitted an application for two more corset designs, both of which have a center front piece that reaches all the way around the body to the center back. While both of the corsets illustrated have a straight front, like the 1904 design, the center front cutting line of the pattern is not cut perfectly straight. It angles out slightly above the waistline.

Using the top edge as a guide I overlaid the 1904 and 1905 illustrations and filled in the lost part of the center front.  Then I cut the pieces out, connected pieces A and B at the front, and lined them up along the center front line of the 1905 pattern to make certain I had the right angle for the center front. Yep. The grainline was established by drawing a grid on the pattern lining up the letter A on piece A and the word Fig. 3, which were on the same horizontal axis. I had the official pattern.

What a difference! Changing the angle of center front line provided more fabric at the bust, where it was desperately needed. Adding one extra bone to each side of the mock up kept the fabric from pinching at the waist, giving a nice curve instead of a sharp angle. With the excess fabric of the hip panel removed at the center back, instead of taking it out of the darts, the fabric draped beautifully across the hip.

The hip pieces were long, and the center dart was placed more to the back than to the side so something was off there, but I was sure it was solvable.

The biggest surprise was the difference in posture. In the first mock up I have my usual pelvis-tilted-forward slouch but my back is definitely straighter with the second. I couldn’t believe it, Savoye’s three pieces really were adding up to the classic Edwardian silhouette.

Line 71 of the patent explains the edge “is preferably very convex toward the bottom, so as to run down the sides of the person in order that the piece C shall cover the hip.”

Savoye’s illustration does not show the corset on a figure, but the hip panels clearly do not run so far down the body that it looks as though the wearer is wearing shorts, the way my second mock-up did. The lowest point at the side hip is roughly level with the low point of the center front.

Two Pansy Corset ads from 1904 helped determine the hip panel length. The first, from March of that year (left), presents a corset described as “medium length over the hips.” The second, from November (right), shows a corset cut similarly to the 1904 patent design with the hips covered but the bottom edge reaching only to the top of the leg.

If the shorter of the two was considered medium then the longer, but not excessively long, must be full coverage, which is what I believe Savoye intended with patent design 786,685.

The cover of the August 1905 edition of Dessous Elegants features a corset cut just like Savoye’s design, three pieces, the point at the bottom center rising up then dipping back down to give full coverage over the hips, but not covering the thighs.

The darts were brought into proper position by removing the fabric from the front of the hip piece C instead of the center back. I removed over an inch from the center front, blending the new line to the point where the seam hit the waistline.

After one more fitting to fine-tune the shape of the top and bottom edges, the Savoye 1904 was ready to be constructed.

Now that it was time to choose the fabrics for the finished corset, I let the master’s work be my guide.

Savoye’s corsets were very high-end. An 1895 advertisement shows Fasso corsets costing between $6.00 and $12.00 which compares to those made in the USA running between 50¢ and $2.50. 

That same year, when Consuelo Vanderbilt married Charles Spencer Churchill 9^th Duke of Marlborough, she wore a Fasso corset under her gown. It was made with white carnation patterned satin brocade, Valenciennes lace, and had solid gold busk clasps. Even from the rough black and white drawing of the corset, one can tell that it must have been a lovely foundation garment.

The price of a Pansy Corset in 1904 ranged from $6.00 to $28.00. That translates to $300 to $4,240 today.

I wanted to hint at the rarified world of Savoye’s clientele, and since Savoye said his design could achieve an “agreeable appearance by means of seam lines alone” I wanted to focus attention on those seam lines. A solidly colored silk dupioni with contrast satin piping at the seams would satisfy both requirements.

Savoye gave no specifications regarding boning placement for this design, but on January 25, 1904, just 11 days after he filed the patent application for the three piece corset, he submitted another application relating to the “whaleboning of corsets.” 

He states that bones were normally “arranged in an arbitrary manner…from top to bottom of the corset.” His improvement is to arrange the bones “in a rational and economic manner” using shorted bones placed only over the waist, leaving the upper and lower parts of the corset pliable. This arrangement means bones are less likely to break “especially when what are called “spring-steel” whalebones are used.” In order to maintain the form of the upper part of the corset “without rendering it stiff” he uses ribbons running around the bust section that can be tied in the front.

This is an interesting idea, but it’s easy to envision the bust collapsing when the fabric is not held taut by bones running vertically, and I don’t want horizontal ribbons competing with the curved seam lines of this corset.

In the application for the 1905 corset designs he refers to his patented method of bone placement but extends the length of every other bone above the waist to top edge “to bear up the said piece and keep it stretched.” This system of alternating shorter bones with longer ones is what I decided to use.

Regarding busk length, line 86 of the patent application explains, “the busks extend over the whole height of the front or only over the interior part of the front.” The illustration for the boning patent shows the busk in only the lower and middle parts of the corset, it does not extend into the upper bust part. The tension put on fabric when a corset is laced can cause the top half inch or so that isn’t supported by the busk to pull and gap at the center front. I do not want to see what happens when the busk stops two or three inches short of the top edge. Since Savoye gave me an option of busk lengths I chose to have the busk running the entire length of the center front.

I was wary before trying on this corset. I’d worked with dupioni in the past with great results, but I’d used quilter’s basting spray to hold it to another fabric, Wonder Under was different. There was no repositioning, no give for turn-of-the-cloth, and as I worked with it sections bubbled unattractively. It also killed the grain and drape of the fabric.

With just three pieces that wrap around the body, the bias grain is important to this corset and it no longer existed.

The fit of the hips had completely changed from the mock up to the final and the only thing I did differently was use different fabric.