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10. At what age (if a very slender figure is desired) should corset wearing be commenced?

Corsetière A: ''At fourteen to sixteen; not before in my opinion. And then tighter lacing should only be very carefully encouraged, and very gradually carried out.'' Corsetière B: ''Twelve or thirteen years of age is quite early enough to begin, but many girls of ten or eleven are now-a-days laced up if a very slim waist is wished.''

The conclusions I have arrived at by means of this special inquiry are:

that tight-lacing is decidedly on the increase, and that a revival of a rigorous nature is likely to recur;
that women, many of them, will ''lace'', in spite of all warnings of dress reformers and medical men;
that the ultra-fashionable and the upper middle class are not given to the practice of waist compression; and
that the borderland of Kensington and Maida Vale [where courtesans lived] can show some of the smallest waists on record.

Tight-lacing, however, is not entirely confined to any one class, for only the other day, in Gray's Inn Road, we saw two factory girls with waists (probably not a whit over 15 inches) which would have been the envy of a fashionable belle.

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