Waiting to Exhale

The corset is one of the most controversial pieces of clothing in fashion history. It is viewed as both a symbol of femininity and a symbol of women’s oppression.

“Women have worn corsets for 400 years because comfort has always been less important than female beauty, social status and respectability,” said fashion historian Valerie Steele, who has curated a corset exhibit at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising here called “The Corset: Fashioning the Body.” The show tries to make sense of the corset, examining its cultural and social significance with more than 200 historical examples of the undergarments, corset-inspired fashions by 20th century designers, archival photographs, posters, books, caricatures and ads.

The idea that corsets have served to control female sexuality is a central theme.

“As late as the early 1960s, if you didn’t wear a bra, people thought you were immoral,” Steele said.

Over the centuries, women have endured great pain to achieve an ideal 20-, 18- or even 16-inch waist.

The earliest object on display is a rare 16th century iron corset, which looks more like a torture device than body-shaping lingerie. Historians believe it was used to correct spinal deformities.

But corsets were not popularized as health aids; they’ve always been primarily intended as tools for aesthetic improvement. Both men and women wore laced-up clothing in the Middle Ages to appear more stately. In the late 16th century, wealthy women in Spain and Italy began wearing ridged corsets to achieve the same effect. And the garment was also a kind of status symbol, constraining the wearer’s movement, signaling she could afford to pay others (servants) to move for her. “The prestige associated with corsets lasted for years,” Steele said, “even though eventually even housemaids wore them.”

The exhibit features several examples from the Victorian era, including a maternity corset, a child’s corset and a man’s corset. At the time, “virtuous” women wore only white satin corsets. Colorful lingerie was deemed too racy until the early 19th century, which was considered the “great age” of lingerie--an era evoked even today in the name of popular retailer Victoria’s Secret.

“Bust bodies,” or bras, began to appear in 1890, but they were always worn with corsets. With the advent of elastic in the 20th century, corsets were at last made more comfortable, although that is perhaps too strong an adjective for a garment that by its nature restricts the body.

“In 1920, when the tango was all the rage,” said Steele, “there were millions of ads for elastic corsets women could tango in.”

The shape of corsets has changed over time with the shifting ideal of the female form. Women have worn corsets designed to raise the bosom and to flatten it, corsets molded to diminish the hips or accentuate them.

The hourglass shape and the rich social psychology of corsets has influenced many contemporary fashion designers, including Anna Sui, who showed jeans with a corset in her spring 2000 collection. Inspiration drawn from 18th century corsets can be seen in evening gowns by Christian Lacroix, Karl Lagerfeld and Yves Saint Laurent. Designs for the corseted femme fatale are represented in the exhibit by Alexander McQueen and Jean-Paul Gaultier, who designed the now-famous and fierce bustier worn by Madonna during her 1993 “Blonde Ambition” tour. Steele hails Madonna for transforming the image of the corset from one of sexual repression into one of sexual liberation.

But even as women achieved social and political equality in the 20th century’s so-called “second wave” of feminism, the corset did not disappear. As anyone who has been in the lingerie department of the local department store could attest, it evolved into a girdle, then a bra, and then into permutations that include such things as “body slimmers,” softly restrictive shaping garments.

But, said Steele, the corset has gone much further than changing earthly shape: The corset has transcended physicality and has become, in effect, a state of mind.

“Women have internalized the corset through diet and exercise,” said Steele. “They go to the YMCA for body sculpting class and instead of lacing it up, they do hundreds of ab exercises.”

For those who wonder whether a corset can inflict permanent change, there is in the exhibit a pair of X-rays taken of Catherine Jung, a well-preserved Connecticut woman, before and after years of tight lacing. Jung, who attended the opening in a waist-pinching velvet gown, is a proud self-corseter. She has been lacing herself in for 40 years, during which time her waist has permanently shrunk from 28 to 15 inches. And although corsets have historically been blamed for liver damage, poor circulation and difficulty breathing, Jung claimed never to have experienced any related health problems.

She was introduced to corsets by her husband, an orthopedic surgeon, who also occasionally wears one. She was prompted to try them after giving birth to three children. “Exercise wasn’t going to help,” she said, “but this keeps my figure in check.”