Unlike Renaissance women, Victorian women were very body conscious. Sexy meant having the smallest waistline humanly possible– in order to achieve this look, women wore corsets. Some corsets were wound so tight that women could hardly breathe, to the point where sitting down was completely out of the question.
Many women would even break ribs trying to get their waistlines down to an inconceivable 12 inches. Layered petticoats, hoops, and bustles became very popular, all of which magnified the largest parts of the body.
The 1920s was a decade when women didn't want to look like women at all.
We can’t imagine that men today would find this sexy, but some women of the ’20s era would even bind their chests with strips of cloth to achieve a little boy look– quite contradictory to some of the measures that today's women
take in order to amplify their
chests.