Few garments are as beholden to controversy and body politics as the corset. Case in point: the outrage over photos that actor Anya Taylor-Joy posted on Instagram this week wearing a corset, captioned with an hourglass emoji.
The comments below provided a good example of the polarized sentiment surrounding the much-maligned garment. “Can’t we normalize hunger?” said someone. “What a terrible thing to do to yourself or to share this with others,” said another. Some people say, “There is such a misconception about corsets. Everyone relax”, “Everyone is ‘body positivity!!!’ until you become a skinny person in a corset” or simply just flaming emojis.
Despite their association with unrealistic body image, patriarchal oppression, and physical discomfort (known to reduce lung capacity and even cause organ deformity when tightly tied), corsets are not only here to stay, they’re having a moment. Pioneering the way the winds of fashion blow, Beyoncé recently appeared on a series of covers of CR Fashion Book wearing a corset.
There were a few featured at the most recent London fashion week. At Simone Rocha, models wore corsets stitched in delicate fabrics such as tulle and organza as part of a collection inspired by Queen Victoria’s mourning dress. Football jerseys and bomber jackets were transformed with corsets in the fashion show where rebellious and lively designer Dilara Fındıkoğlu addressed the themes of toxic masculinity. But what really sparked the revival was the extreme corseting at the last John Galliano show for Maison Margiela in Paris. What Taylor-Joy wore was a design from this collection.
This isn’t just a trend in the elite world of high fashion. From Boohoo to John Lewis, corsets are having a moment, with online searches for “corset” rising by 30% last month compared to the previous month. Corset searches on vintage clothing site Depop are up 27% month over month. It is worth noting that very few of the existing lots are worn with tight lacing.
The fact that corsets are enjoying a particular moment may be tied to the extreme femininity movement that saw women wear pink and bows. “Romanticism greatly popularized ‘regency core’ and ‘cottage core’ corsets,” says Mariana Rebelo, who sells corsets at her Depop store Kara Kroa.
Kristin Mallison, who transforms vintage tapestries into corsets, is one of many designers getting creative with historical clothing. Cierra Boyd upcycles old Nike sneakers and Louis Vuitton bags. She explains that Mallison’s designs “reframe them in a modern context… a much more relaxed and much more comfortable iteration of the corsets worn hundreds of years ago.”
So why does fashion persist with such a controversial outfit? Its intricate ornaments are part of its charm. On the one hand, corsets symbolize patriarchal oppression. On the other hand, negative connotations mean that they can be used as weapons to signal rebellion, as best evidenced by the punk style that featured corsets in Vivienne Westwood’s autumn/winter 1987 collection, elevating them from underwear to outerwear. And they are no longer worn as underwear, but largely front and center.
“Anything that is an emblem or symbol of oppression already has an innate power,” says Michaela Stark, whose couture designs subvert the modus operandi of corsets and use them to draw attention to body parts they were traditionally intended to conceal. “liberating the body rather than repressing it”.
With the current focus on identity politics, “people are really trying to break down gender norms,” she says, and “the easiest way is to take advantage of traditionally feminine clothing and use them to play with perceptions of what feminine is.” feminine”.
Corsets were repeated many times, says fashion historian Kass McGann of Reconstructing History. “The first surviving historical object that we could reasonably call a ‘corset’… [is] Funeral clothes of Eleanora of Toledo, Duchess of Florence.” Its function, he says, is as the basis for the elaborate dress worn over it, rather than “shaping the body in an unnatural way”. Heavy boning appeared in bodices in the 17th century, and “it was only with the development of metal hoops in the 1830s that corsets became tightly laced.”
She also says that the recognition of the corset as something imposed on women by the patriarchy is not the whole picture. “I don’t want to give too much credit to men, but it wasn’t the patriarchy that forced women to wear tight corsets. Of course, the argument could also be made that women adhere to this ridiculous physical ideal in order to attract men’s attention.” She notes that there was a lot of male criticism of tight corsets throughout the 19th century, “they even went so far as to invent a ‘safety corset’ in the 1890s that did not compress the waist. Unfortunately, instead it rotated the spine unnaturally and more women than ever before died while wearing it.”
She thinks the mainstream approach to corseting is a byproduct of popular cultural representations rather than historical facts. “The famous scene in Gone with the Wind, where Miss Scarlett tries to pull her maid’s corset down to her 18-inch waist while holding on to the bedpost, is so entrenched in our psyches that when we think of corsets, we can’t see anything else.” However, he says that such corsets were not worn at the time the movie was shot.
The polysemous nature of the corset has occupied people for centuries. Many commentators think that the choice is important, that corsets are not one thing, their meanings change shape with context. The corset that Michelle Obama wore over the dress on the cover of Elle magazine in 2018, or the unfastened corsets that feminist designer Miuccia Prada sent down the catwalk in 2016, definitely give different meanings to what was imposed on women in the past.
“If you have to do it strictly and you feel like there’s this expectation on you, that’s where the work becomes really problematic and restrictive, not really liberating at all,” Stark says. “But if you have the choice to do it…that’s when it becomes something a little more liberating; something you can start playing with and experimenting with.”
“I think they have very different faces and different purposes,” says costume designer Ellen Mirojnick, who used them for silhouette purposes rather than making a statement on Bridgerton. “Women have so many different faces, and in today’s age, we’ve come a long way in terms of having everything at your fingertips.”
McGann sees a double standard in the response to Taylor-Joy. “Isn’t this just another case in the long history of regulating women’s choices? Did anyone accuse Billy Porter of being unrealistic and damaging to beauty standards when he wore a Christian Siriano dress to the Oscars in 2019? I’m sure she’s wearing a corset there!”
According to McGann, “the best thing about a corset: you can take it off and lie on the couch and eat a nap.”