The Books: The Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town, edited by Lillian Ross; ‘Corsets de Luxe’, by Geoffrey Hellman

Next up on the essays shelf:

The Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town (Modern Library Paperbacks) is a collection of “The Talk of the Town” pieces in The New Yorker, grouped by decade, which is a lot of fun because you can see how the “voice” of the magazine developed, and how “The Talk of the Town” has grown and changed over the years.

Another fun thing is you really get a sense of the New York in all of these different eras: the Jazz Age, the Depression, its Golden Age of the 40s and 50s … they are snapshots, of very specific sub-cultures and personalities. So you get glimpses of Fred Astaire’s stardom, of Lou Gehrig’s personality, of all of these New York personalities, in different cultures, careers, classes … all making up the giant bustling collage of the metropolis. Love this collection!

This 1930 Talk of the Town piece, by Geoffrey Hellman (bylines became more frequent as the decades went on) is a perfect example. It’s about a famous corset-maker in New York, Mme. Binner. She was corset-maker to the stars. Mae West was a regular customer. Lillian Russell, too.

Mme. Binner was also an innovator. She developed the corset to be a more comfortable garment. I was just Googling around and there are some interesting pieces out there about Binner.

In my wild 20s, I used to wear corsets and garters belts and thigh-high stockings. I never wore heels, I’d wear saddle shoes or Doc Martens. It was a pleasing ensemble to me. I could have used Mme. Binner’s help – but her innovations made so much of all of that possible.

Here is an excerpt. I love the bit about doctors sending their patients to Mme. Binner, to create a better less painful corset. “I know just who to send you to!” Also: “Before that garters had just wandered around with no real home.” Funny.

The Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town (Modern Library Paperbacks), edited by Lillian Ross; ‘Corsets de Luxe’, by Geoffrey Hellman

Whenever Mae West needs a new corset for something like “Diamond Lil” she goes to Mme. Binner’s in Fifth Avenue at Fifty-eighth Street. Many, many people needing corsets go to Mme. Binner. She started on her career in Vienna. At the age of eleven she took to making corsets, to pass the time away. After coming to this country, in the early eighties, she was a lone – but a loud – voice in the wilderness, pointing out the horrors of the hourglass corset. Women clients who insisted on having them she sent to doctors for X-rays, to show them what a mess tight corsets made of their ribs. The grateful doctors sent clients to Mme. Binner, who made them light sensible corsets. At present, they say, she has two thousand customers, including such women as Mrs. Charles Steele, Mrs. Seth Thomas, Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Mrs. Elbridge Gerry, and Mrs. Thomas Lamont. Some ladies buy ten or a dozen corsets at a time. Mme. Binner also has a few men customers who have curvature of the spine or who need artificial support while recovering from an operation. For them she designs special corsets. She is also the inventor of the detached brassiere and – probably more important – she was the first person to think of attaching garters to corsets. Before that garters had just wandered around with no real home.

The first gartered corset was made for Lillian Russell, who was so enchanted with it she became a regular customer, later ordering from Mme. Binnie the most expensive corset ever made. It cost thirty-nine hundred dollars – fourteen hundred dollars for the corset proper and twenty-five hundred dollars for the garters, which had diamond buckles. Once, when her house in Long Island burned down, Miss Russell’s first cry after her escape was, “My support! My support!” “Your what?” demanded a fireman. “My corset!” shrieked Miss Russell.