Ethel Mary Wilson was born in 1905, she was a plain unsophisticated girl who wore the shapeless dresses of the 1920’s until she met a young astronomer named William Arnold Granger whom she married in 1928. William told Ethel about his appreciation for corsets and expressed his wish to feel one around the waist of his wife. One day, Ethel asked William to put his arms around her waist and to his surprise he felt a pair of corsets that tied Ethel into 24 inches, more or less her natural waist line. From here the process of Ethel’s metamorphosis began.

She began wearing a corset day and night to reduce her waist size. After several years the result was ethel’s legendary 13 inch waist, the smallest waist ever recorded on the 50’s institution The Guinness Book of Records. One cannot deny that William was one of the harshest task masters in the history of fashion. Ethel was a product of fashion and sexual fetish. Her husband believed that fashion influenced the structure of our most intimate thoughts. When William and Ethel married in 1928, she wore very high heels, beautiful earrings, and a short knee-length skirt. A corset completed her outfit. After the birth of their daughter Ethel’s breasts had become larger, like any man William was excited by this change, unfortunately this change did not last, and so he suggested wearing gold rings in her nipples, which she refused at first.

In the Woman’s Sunday Mirror of June 16, 1967 Ethel was photographed wearing five inch heels and a black leather belt over her dress, she was now 52 years of age and a mother of a 27 year old daughter. Her final measurements were 36/13/38. Ethel had 12 piercings in each ear, eleven holes ran along the edge, and one was placed in the middle called a Conch. She also had each of her cheeks pierced, a Medusa and Laberate, both nipples, each side of her nose, and two piercings in her septum. William had stretched one of her septums, both nipples, conch, and lobe piercings. He had stretched her lobes so that daylight could be seen through, he was scared to go any further than 8mm due to the skin being so thin, and eventually he convinced her to stretch her nipples in an attempt to enlarge her breasts. At first she wasn’t comfortable wearing her jewlery and showing her figure off in public but after the war, with the change in fashion, Ethel and William began breaking down barriers. The septum rings she had worn in the privacy of their home for the pleasure of her husband was worn in public and she no longer hide the numerous piercings in her ears with her hair.