Anya Taylor-Joy sparked controversy by posting a photo of the corset she wore under her dress for the US premiere of Dune: Part Two on Sunday. Photo: Gregory Pace/Rex/Shutterstock
Few garments are as intertwined with controversy and body politics as the corset. Case in point: the furor this week surrounding photos that actor Anya Taylor-Joy posted on Instagram of herself wearing a corset, with an hourglass emoji caption.
The comments below provided a great example of the polarized thinking surrounding the much-maligned garment. "Can't we normalize famine?" said one. "What a horrible, horrible thing to do to yourself or share with others," said another. Others went the other way, like "There's such a misconception about corsets. Relax everyone," to "Everyone is body positivity!!!" until it's a skinny person in a corset," or, succinctly, just flaming emojis.
Despite their associations with unrealistic body image, patriarchal repression, and physical discomfort (when tightly strapped, they are known to reduce lung capacity and even cause organ deformities) corsets are not only here to stay, but are having a moment. An epitome of how the fashion winds are blowing, Beyoncé has just been featured on a series of covers for CR Fashion Book wearing corsets.
Several were on display at the most recent fashion week in London. At Simone Rocha, the models wore corsets, stitched in delicate fabrics, including tulle and organza, as part of a collection inspired by Queen Victoria's mourning dress. At vibrant, rebellious designer Dilara Findikoglu's show, which explored themes of toxic masculinity, football shirts and bomber jackets were transformed with corsetting. But it was the extreme corsets from the recent John Galliano show for Maison Margiela in Paris that really sparked the revival. It was a design from this collection that Taylor-Joy wore.
It is not just a trend in the exclusive world of high fashion. From Boohoo to John Lewis, where online searches for "corsets" rose 30% last month compared to the month before, corsets are having a moment. On the vintage clothing site Depop, searches for corsets are increasing by 27% month on month. Although it should be noted, very few of the current batch are worn tightly laced.
The story continues
The fact that corsets are enjoyed at some point may have to do with the hyper-feminine movement that has women wearing pink and bows. "Romance, 'regency core' and 'cottage core' have made corsets extremely popular," says Mariana Rebelo, who sells corsets at her Depop store Kara Kroa.
Kristin Mallison, who makes corsets from vintage tapestries, is one of the designers who gets creative with the historic garment. Cierra Boyd upcycles old Nike sneakers and Louis Vuitton handbags. Mallison's designs, she explains, "reframe them in a modern context... a much more casual - and much more comfortable - version of the corsets worn hundreds of years ago."
So why does fashion continue to push forward with such a controversial garment? The intricate attributes are part of its appeal. On the one hand, corsets symbolize patriarchal oppression. On the other hand, it is precisely their negative associations that allow them to be weaponized to signal rebellion, as perhaps best illustrated by Vivienne Westwood's punk take on corsets - they featured in her autumn/winter 1987 collection and elevated them from underwear to outerwear. And it is largely front and center, rather than as undergarments, that they are now worn.
"Anything that is such an emblem or symbol of repression already has an innate power," says Michaela Stark, whose couture designs subvert the modus operandi of corsets and use them to draw attention to the parts of the body they traditionally have to hide. to "liberate the body rather than oppress it."
With the current focus on identity politics, she says, "people are really trying to break gender norms" and "the easiest way is to take garments that are so traditionally feminine and use them to play a little bit with perceptions about what female".
Fashion historian Kass McGann of Reconstructing History says corsets have gone through many iterations. The "first surviving historical object that we can reasonably call a 'corset'... [is] the funeral clothes of Eleanor of Toledo, Duchess of Florence. Its function, she says, was as a basis for the elaborate dress worn over it, rather than "to shape the body in a way that was unnatural". It was in the 17th century that heavy boning came into bodices and "not until the development of metal eyelets in the 1830s, where corsets were tightly laced".
Furthermore, she says, the corset's reputation as something forced on women by patriarchy is not the whole picture. 'I don't want to give men too much credit, but it wasn't patriarchy that forced women into tight corsets. Although of course you could argue that women adhere to this ridiculous physical ideal to compete for men's attention." She notes that there was a lot of male criticism of tight corsets throughout the 19th century, "in the 1890s it went so far as to invent a 'safety corset' that did not compress the waist. Unfortunately, the spine instead changed in an unnatural way and more women died wearing it than before."
She thinks the mainstream view of the corset is a byproduct of popular cultural representations rather than historical facts. "The famous scene from Gone With the Wind, in which Miss Scarlett holds on to a bedpost while her maid struggles to get her corset down to an 18-inch waist, is so ingrained in our psyche that we can't see anything different when we look at corsets think." But, she says, this type of corset was not worn in the period in which the film is set.
The polysemic nature of the corset has fascinated people for centuries. Many commentators believe that choice is key - that corsets are not one thing and that their meaning changes shape depending on the context. Michelle Obama in a corset worn over a dress on the cover of Elle magazine in 2018, or the undone corsets sent down the runway by feminist designer Miuccia Prada in 2016 certainly read differently than the corsets worn on women in the past were imposed.
"If you have to do it tightly and you feel like you have that expectation on you, then it becomes really problematic and limiting, not liberating at all," says Stark. "But if you have the choice to do that... then it becomes something liberating - something you can play with and experiment with."
The costume designer Ellen Mirojnick, who used them on Bridgerton for silhouette purposes, rather than to make a statement, says, "I think they have a lot of different faces and different purposes. Women have many different faces and now that we have everything available to you, we have come a long way."
McGann sees a double standard in the response to Taylor-Joy. "Isn't this just another case in a long history of manipulating women's choices? Did anyone accuse Billy Porter of unrealistic and harmful beauty standards when he wore a Christian Siriano dress to the Oscars in 2019? I guarantee he was wearing a corset underneath!
According to McGann, "the best thing about a corset: you can take it off and lie on the couch and eat chocolates."
