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The beguiling form of the fashionable 19th
century woman – the billowing hooped skirt, shapely corset, and coquettish
parasol – were all made possible thanks to baleen (or, as they called it in the
1800s, “whalebone.”)
The huge strips of baleen found in a whale’s mouth (which
they used to filter food from the seawater) was the “plastic” of the 1800s;
light, strong, and flexible, it could be molded into hoops for skirts, handles
and ribs for parasols, and “busks” that gave corsets their shape. Without
the whaling industry supplying this vital material, women’s fashion in the
1800s may have been very different indeed.
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