Immediately after each pregnancy, she dieted and exercised rigorously; the smallness of her waist, which she appeared to flaunt and exaggerate, angered the Archduchess, who wanted her to be continuously pregnant. There were frequent rumours of grave illnesses at this time; consumption was widely diagnosed, and she was even accused of killing herself with tight-lacing.
Her health improved immediately after she left Vienna for extended travels, and was able to confront the physical hardships of nature and sport. On her return to Vienna in August 1862, a lady-in-waiting noted her improved sociability, and that ''she looks splendidly, she eats properly, sleeps well, and does not tight-lace anymore'' . At this time her waist-measure had probably increased to 18 inches, its reputed extent (more or less) until her death
.
Other costumes exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art had external measures of 18 1/2 inches and 19 1/2 inches (two, including the bodice through which the Empress was stabbed to death).
In 1882, she is described by the Prince of Hesse as ''almost inhumanly slender.'' In 1887 she was ''scarcely human in (her) fantastic attributes of hair and line'' (Haslip, pp. 334 and 373). In 1890, she is still ''graceful, but almost too slender'' and ''excessively slender, but still in terror of growing stout''
. She was at this time having herself heavily massaged, and wrapped naked in wet sheets impregnated with seaweed. She transmitted her horror of fat women to her daughter Valerie, who was positively terrified when, as a little girl, she first met Queen Victoria.
Her body became a religious cult, but one of a highly ascetic and solitary nature. Clothing, as such, was excluded from the cult. She disliked the expensive accoutrements and the constant changes of outfit to which her role condemned her.
She caused offence by the plainness, the preferred monochrome of her attire .
What mattered to her was perfect fit.
An essential and early constituent of her legend was that she was regularly sewn into her riding-habit. ''It was common knowledge in the hunting-field that a tailor from Whitchurch went every day to the Abbey to sew the skirt of the Empress' habit onto her close-fitting bodice, so that there should not be the slightest crease or wrinkle around her 18 inch waist'' .
Her niece Countess Marie Larisch (p.65) confirms this custom, and that ''she wore high laced boots with tiny spurs.''
Her English hunting companions loved her for her warmth, modesty, ease of manner, for the fact that she was not at all ''sewn-in,'' and for her anger at any instance of cruelty to horses which came to her attention .
Some of her corsets were made in leather, like those of a Parisian courtesan. ''Her many-coloured satin and moiré corsets were made in Paris, and she only wore them for a few weeks. They had no front-fastenings (i.e., no split busk, current since c. 1860), and Elizabeth was always laced into her corsets, a proceeding which sometimes took quite an hour .
She never wore petticoats ... when she took her walks she slipped her unstockinged feet into her boots, and wore no underlinen of any description ... she slept on an iron bedstead, with no pillows'' .
Her hair was a glory, in texture very thick and wavy, a rich chestnut in colour, and hung down below her knees.
Dressing it was the most important ritual of the toilette, which lasted up to two hours, during which she usually read, or studied languages. Many anecdotes testify how her self-imposed ''enslavement'' to her hair sublimated her sense of enslavement to the public role, how she used her capillary crown ''in order to get rid of the other one'' (the imperial crown).
