In early seventeenth-century France, the term corps piqué or corps baleiné entered fashion and household vocabulary to describe the stiffened undergarment worn across the torso, marking the first systematic textual documentation of what would become known as the corset. Parisian tailors and cloth merchants began recording these garments in inventories and trade accounts. This linguistic crystallization signalled the corset's transformation from an ad hoc garment into a codified item of women's dress with clear commercial and social dimensions.

The naming of the corset in written records coincided with a flourishing of French court literature that celebrated — and occasionally subverted — the ideals of feminine beauty it enforced. Montaigne's essays, though prose, raised questions about custom and bodily nature that indirectly questioned such constraints. Later, Molière's satirical theatre would mock the excesses of fashion including tight lacing, giving poets a comic tradition to draw upon.