People sometimes do strange things in the name of love. If you’ve ever fallen hard for a special someone, you know that love can be as dangerous as drugs or alcohol. Upon finding someone you adore above all else, you would do almost anything to please them. But no matter how much you love your significant other, there is the line that marks off crazy romantic from crazy insane, and it’s better not to cross it.
But Ethel Granger made a truly strange sacrifice to please her partner. A native of Cambridgeshire, England, she met the astronomer William Arnold Granger as a young woman and they got married in 1928. From the very beginning of their relationship, William never hesitated to demonstrate how much he loved corsets and tiny waists.
Regardless of the fact that a corset look went completely out of style by the end of the 1920s, Ethel wanted to please her husband no matter what, and so she began wearing a corset regularly.
At first, she only wore it during the day, but soon William requested to put on the article at night, too. Ethel’s waist was never big, but this everyday routine squeezed it tighter and tighter, making it ever smaller. Moreover, William’s strong ideas about what was attractive and feminine didn’t end there. He also asked his wife to start wearing extremely high-heeled shoes and to get numerous piercings on her face and body.
Ethel’s waist continued to shrink until it reached 13 inches which earned the woman a place in the Guinness Book of World Records. Her record has yet to be broken. In September 2011, the Italian version of the fashion magazine “Vogue” dedicated a volume to her.
No doubt, the beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and Ethel might have liked her transformed body, but it’s rather sad that her husband couldn’t find her beautiful as she already was.
