History loves to soften her edges — but Empress Elisabeth of Austria, known as Sisi, was never the delicate fairytale princess romanticized in portraits and films. She was strikingly tall for her era at 5’8”, with a famously tiny 19-inch waist, a figure she maintained through relentless discipline. Sisi exercised obsessively, fasted for long periods, and spent hours riding horses at punishing intensity. Beauty, for her, was not vanity — it was control. In a rigid imperial court that suffocated her, control over her body was one of the few freedoms she had left. Sisi shocked 19th-century Europe with behavior considered scandalous for an empress. She smoked, traveled alone, and…