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http://www.theage.com.au/news/Fashion/The-big-squeeze/2005/04/15/1113509922349.html?oneclick=true
Here's the full article:
The big squeeze
April 16, 2005
What is it about the corset that makes us so breathlessly fascinated? Laura
Barton laces up to see what gives.
Perhaps I shouldn't have had lunch. Indeed, to be in with even a cat in
hell's chance of mustering the waspish proportions of Kylie Minogue, who was
pictured on stage this week twirling a heavily corseted 16-inch waist, one
would surely have to forgo eating, drinking and probably all breathing
whatsoever. Not to mention a few ribs.
If you've ever been stuck in a lift, you will have a hint of what it is like
to be laced into a corset. There is a sudden blaze of panic, of airlessness,
before one is distracted by the fiery lick of the laces, and the sight of
flesh as it concertinas over the spine and disagreeably rumples over the
waistband.
Kylie having set an irresistible challenge, I find myself being hoiked into
a series of increasingly sturdy corsets and my waist squeezed from a
stalwart 26 inches to a violin-shaped 24 inches. Yes, breathing is tricky,
laughter impossible, yet I feel curiously emboldened.
Preposterous garment it may be, but there is something about women and
corsets. We've been liberated from our bustles and freed from our hooped
skirts, but we can't seem to get over our guilty fantasy about lacing
ourselves up too tightly to breathe. While the corset's popularity peaked a
few years ago with Madonna's conical version and the film Dangerous
Liaisons, the recent media excitement over Kylie's burlesque John Galliano
outfits may prefigure another stampede for the waspy waist.
It is a passion fuelled by literature, television and Hollywood: Vivien
Leigh in Gone With the Wind hollering for Mammy to pull tighter on those
corset laces; Judy Garland in Meet Me In St Louis, breathless after being
squeezed down to some improbably tiny waist.
And, naturally, corsets have played a starring role in countless BBC costume
dramas - after all, one has to have a bodice to rip. But in 2005, the
fashion for corsetry sits pretty uneasily with our notion of ourselves as
modern women. Can we simultaneously yearn for emancipation and a 16-inch
waist?
The earliest corsets arrived in the 13th century, and it took us seven
centuries to break out of them. One might, therefore, expect the very notion
of corseting to be filed next to foot-binding as an example of history's
curious sartorial enslavement of women. The effect, after all, of all that
lacing and whaleboning and thick metal rivets was an array of physical
problems that one might broadly describe as "squishing the innards". Tales
abound of welts, fainting, even of unborn foetuses crippled in the womb.
"In the 19th century," says Lucy Johnston, curator of 19th-century fashion
at London's Victoria and Albert Museum, "there were magazine ads for
'healthy' corsets, saying they had less boning but still enhanced the
figure."
In reality, unsurprisingly, they were no better for the feminine health than
the other sort - indeed, the campaign against the corset was waged as much
by doctors as it was by women.
"Burn the corsets!" wrote the proto-feminist writer Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
in 1874. "Make a bonfire of the cruel steels that have lorded it over your
thorax and abdomen and heave a sigh of relief."
And yet still fashion salivates over that hourglass silhouette. It is
tangible in the new-found predilection for burlesque (the burlesque
performer Dita von Teese, also the current squeeze of the singer Marilyn
Manson, is rarely sighted outside a tightly clinched bodice) as well as the
boom in exotic, expensive lingerie labels such as Agent Provocateur, Myla
and Coco de Mer.
"A corset can make you feel sexy and look fantastic . . . (it) can really
enhance the female figure," says Serena Rees, co-founder of Agent
Provocateur, which has sold corsets since it first opened in 1994.
There may even be evolutionary reasons for its popularity. The corset
seemingly freezes the female form into a perpetual state of being in
flagrante: the arched back and heaving bosom, even the state of
breathlessness.
"There are special reasons for corsets being sexually exciting," explains
Desmond Morris, author of The Naked Woman, "two of which are quite
contradictory reasons: first, you can see a corset in a puritanical way, in
that it acts like a suit of armour, making (the woman) less natural, more
controlled, more unavailable. Or you can see it as a form of erotic
bondage."
The basic appeal of the corset, Morris says, is that it exaggerates the
magic ratio of waist to hips, which for women is 7:10. "That silhouette is
going to have a sexual appeal at a primeval level," he says. "It's
signalling the child-bearing pelvic girdle, there's no great mystery about
that. And, as the male's magic ratio is 9:10, if the female's ratio becomes
6:10, it becomes super-female because it takes it further away from the male
ratio."
Today, Morris argues, corsets cling on only because of their fetishistic
attraction. "And Kylie has a strange fetishistic appeal," he says.
"In modern times, women have wanted to be more active and don't want to make
themselves into these armoured-bondaged females."
Yet the corset has, in more recent times, been reclaimed and championed by
some feminists, who argue that in fact the health risks of corset-wearing
were greatly exaggerated by men who felt that the corset embodied a sort of
thrusting, empowered feminine sexuality, perhaps not entirely unlike what
the codpiece did for men.
In The Corset: A Cultural History, Valerie Steele debates precisely this
point, stating that those who crusaded against the corset did so in an
effort to constrain women's sexuality. She says that nowhere in her
extensive research into costume history has she found the fabled minuscule,
faint-inducing corsets of legend.
In a year-long investigation carried out in conjunction with a fetishist
named Cathy Jung, Steele found that daily tight-lacing created no enduring
effects on a woman's health. Displaced organs, left to roam free, appeared
to replace themselves happily.
Indeed, the corset grants its female wearer a different kind of sexuality to
that peddled on the covers of lads' mags. It is at once a marriage of pure
sexuality and a level of restrained social respectability. Arguably, this is
why the corset is popular with brides: the corseted wedding dress at once
being a manifestation of purity, socially sanctioned union, and the marital
sex that lies ahead.
The corset projects a sort of womanliness, as opposed to the attractions of
a vest-wearing slip of a girl. "It needs hips and bosom and bottom," says
Rowan Pelling, founding editor of The Erotic Review.
Vivienne Westwood, one of the first designers to haul corsets out of the
wilderness, says the garment is about a real, if contrived, womanliness,
which need not only mean constriction. "We want ladies to live and breathe,"
she says. "The corset, flat at the front, which pushes the bust high, gives
a feeling of straightness and pulling up tall through the shoulders to add
to the effect of a very important lady whose great impact is her face."
While the argument that a corset focuses the gaze on a woman's face, as
opposed to her cleavage or her waist, is debatable, it is true that it
grants the wearer a certain poise.
"There aren't many items of clothing you can put on that transform the way
you walk, the way you think, the way you hold yourself," says Pelling. The
only thing comparable, she suggests, is wearing a fabulous stiletto heel.
Whether the corset will continue to sway in and out of fashion in the coming
years remains to be seen.
Increasingly, one might argue, women who want radically to reshape their
torsos do not require the lifting, girdling effects of the corset because
they have the surgeon's knife to permanently uplift and whittle away parts
of their anatomy should they so desire. Liposuction, perhaps, has become the
new whaleboning.
But all the collagen implants and surgical sculpting money can buy cannot
really compete with the irresistibility offered by the corset: it is the
thrill of the unknown, the gift to be unwrapped. Cinched and breathless in a
shop fitting room on a grey Monday afternoon, even I have to concede this to
be true.
- Guardian
Here's the full article:
The big squeeze
April 16, 2005
What is it about the corset that makes us so breathlessly fascinated? Laura
Barton laces up to see what gives.
Perhaps I shouldn't have had lunch. Indeed, to be in with even a cat in
hell's chance of mustering the waspish proportions of Kylie Minogue, who was
pictured on stage this week twirling a heavily corseted 16-inch waist, one
would surely have to forgo eating, drinking and probably all breathing
whatsoever. Not to mention a few ribs.
If you've ever been stuck in a lift, you will have a hint of what it is like
to be laced into a corset. There is a sudden blaze of panic, of airlessness,
before one is distracted by the fiery lick of the laces, and the sight of
flesh as it concertinas over the spine and disagreeably rumples over the
waistband.
Kylie having set an irresistible challenge, I find myself being hoiked into
a series of increasingly sturdy corsets and my waist squeezed from a
stalwart 26 inches to a violin-shaped 24 inches. Yes, breathing is tricky,
laughter impossible, yet I feel curiously emboldened.
Preposterous garment it may be, but there is something about women and
corsets. We've been liberated from our bustles and freed from our hooped
skirts, but we can't seem to get over our guilty fantasy about lacing
ourselves up too tightly to breathe. While the corset's popularity peaked a
few years ago with Madonna's conical version and the film Dangerous
Liaisons, the recent media excitement over Kylie's burlesque John Galliano
outfits may prefigure another stampede for the waspy waist.
It is a passion fuelled by literature, television and Hollywood: Vivien
Leigh in Gone With the Wind hollering for Mammy to pull tighter on those
corset laces; Judy Garland in Meet Me In St Louis, breathless after being
squeezed down to some improbably tiny waist.
And, naturally, corsets have played a starring role in countless BBC costume
dramas - after all, one has to have a bodice to rip. But in 2005, the
fashion for corsetry sits pretty uneasily with our notion of ourselves as
modern women. Can we simultaneously yearn for emancipation and a 16-inch
waist?
The earliest corsets arrived in the 13th century, and it took us seven
centuries to break out of them. One might, therefore, expect the very notion
of corseting to be filed next to foot-binding as an example of history's
curious sartorial enslavement of women. The effect, after all, of all that
lacing and whaleboning and thick metal rivets was an array of physical
problems that one might broadly describe as "squishing the innards". Tales
abound of welts, fainting, even of unborn foetuses crippled in the womb.
"In the 19th century," says Lucy Johnston, curator of 19th-century fashion
at London's Victoria and Albert Museum, "there were magazine ads for
'healthy' corsets, saying they had less boning but still enhanced the
figure."
In reality, unsurprisingly, they were no better for the feminine health than
the other sort - indeed, the campaign against the corset was waged as much
by doctors as it was by women.
"Burn the corsets!" wrote the proto-feminist writer Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
in 1874. "Make a bonfire of the cruel steels that have lorded it over your
thorax and abdomen and heave a sigh of relief."
And yet still fashion salivates over that hourglass silhouette. It is
tangible in the new-found predilection for burlesque (the burlesque
performer Dita von Teese, also the current squeeze of the singer Marilyn
Manson, is rarely sighted outside a tightly clinched bodice) as well as the
boom in exotic, expensive lingerie labels such as Agent Provocateur, Myla
and Coco de Mer.
"A corset can make you feel sexy and look fantastic . . . (it) can really
enhance the female figure," says Serena Rees, co-founder of Agent
Provocateur, which has sold corsets since it first opened in 1994.
There may even be evolutionary reasons for its popularity. The corset
seemingly freezes the female form into a perpetual state of being in
flagrante: the arched back and heaving bosom, even the state of
breathlessness.
"There are special reasons for corsets being sexually exciting," explains
Desmond Morris, author of The Naked Woman, "two of which are quite
contradictory reasons: first, you can see a corset in a puritanical way, in
that it acts like a suit of armour, making (the woman) less natural, more
controlled, more unavailable. Or you can see it as a form of erotic
bondage."
The basic appeal of the corset, Morris says, is that it exaggerates the
magic ratio of waist to hips, which for women is 7:10. "That silhouette is
going to have a sexual appeal at a primeval level," he says. "It's
signalling the child-bearing pelvic girdle, there's no great mystery about
that. And, as the male's magic ratio is 9:10, if the female's ratio becomes
6:10, it becomes super-female because it takes it further away from the male
ratio."
Today, Morris argues, corsets cling on only because of their fetishistic
attraction. "And Kylie has a strange fetishistic appeal," he says.
"In modern times, women have wanted to be more active and don't want to make
themselves into these armoured-bondaged females."
Yet the corset has, in more recent times, been reclaimed and championed by
some feminists, who argue that in fact the health risks of corset-wearing
were greatly exaggerated by men who felt that the corset embodied a sort of
thrusting, empowered feminine sexuality, perhaps not entirely unlike what
the codpiece did for men.
In The Corset: A Cultural History, Valerie Steele debates precisely this
point, stating that those who crusaded against the corset did so in an
effort to constrain women's sexuality. She says that nowhere in her
extensive research into costume history has she found the fabled minuscule,
faint-inducing corsets of legend.
In a year-long investigation carried out in conjunction with a fetishist
named Cathy Jung, Steele found that daily tight-lacing created no enduring
effects on a woman's health. Displaced organs, left to roam free, appeared
to replace themselves happily.
Indeed, the corset grants its female wearer a different kind of sexuality to
that peddled on the covers of lads' mags. It is at once a marriage of pure
sexuality and a level of restrained social respectability. Arguably, this is
why the corset is popular with brides: the corseted wedding dress at once
being a manifestation of purity, socially sanctioned union, and the marital
sex that lies ahead.
The corset projects a sort of womanliness, as opposed to the attractions of
a vest-wearing slip of a girl. "It needs hips and bosom and bottom," says
Rowan Pelling, founding editor of The Erotic Review.
Vivienne Westwood, one of the first designers to haul corsets out of the
wilderness, says the garment is about a real, if contrived, womanliness,
which need not only mean constriction. "We want ladies to live and breathe,"
she says. "The corset, flat at the front, which pushes the bust high, gives
a feeling of straightness and pulling up tall through the shoulders to add
to the effect of a very important lady whose great impact is her face."
While the argument that a corset focuses the gaze on a woman's face, as
opposed to her cleavage or her waist, is debatable, it is true that it
grants the wearer a certain poise.
"There aren't many items of clothing you can put on that transform the way
you walk, the way you think, the way you hold yourself," says Pelling. The
only thing comparable, she suggests, is wearing a fabulous stiletto heel.
Whether the corset will continue to sway in and out of fashion in the coming
years remains to be seen.
Increasingly, one might argue, women who want radically to reshape their
torsos do not require the lifting, girdling effects of the corset because
they have the surgeon's knife to permanently uplift and whittle away parts
of their anatomy should they so desire. Liposuction, perhaps, has become the
new whaleboning.
But all the collagen implants and surgical sculpting money can buy cannot
really compete with the irresistibility offered by the corset: it is the
thrill of the unknown, the gift to be unwrapped. Cinched and breathless in a
shop fitting room on a grey Monday afternoon, even I have to concede this to
be true.
- Guardian
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Date: 2005-04-17 07:00 am (UTC)From:no subject
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