March 2, 2002 Financial Times: How to Spend it: The Corset by Nicholas Foulkes At times the corset makes a music-hall parody of sexuality. There is the graceful image Horst created from this piece of underwear, but there is also a plethora of visual cliches. Still, fashion's most skilled hands have the capacity and ability continually to reinvent the corset. Although its primary purpose, originally, was to reduce the waist, enhance the embonpoint and alter the relative proportions of the silhouette of the female torso, the late 20th century has replaced the corset's sculptural function with exercise, diet, the Wonderbra, liposuction and aesthetic surgery. Today, the corset is in the ironic position of being worn by those who already have the body to flaunt. Since the beginning of the 1990s, when Madonna strapped on her Jean Paul Gaultier-designed armour and stormed into the mythologv of popular culture like a latterday Boadicea with those postmodern conical breasts, the corset has acceded to a symbolic, ceremonial and highly visible role. But it is now at an intriguing stage in a career that has spanned many centuries. Once a relatively mundane undergarment, it has freed itself from hardline feminist stereotyping as a straitjacket riveted on to female bodies by male sensibilities, and is now viewed by lipstick revisionists with a post-feminist ambivalence. The woman volunteers to wear it.Perhaps the most famous image of the corset in popular culture is that of Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With the Wind being laced into hers while moaning that a flabby 2Oin waist is the best it can produce. "See if you can't make it 18 1/2in, or I can't get into any of my dresses." However, the truth is rather less gripping, if you will excuse the pun. According to The Corset: A Cultural History by Valerie Steele: "Many women did reduce their waists by several inches, but accounts of tight-lacing to extreme tenuity usually represent fantasies." Steele removes another cherished tenet of corset mythology as well. According to her research, stories of women having ribs removed to conform to an aesthetic ideal are apocryphal. However rigorously academic the approach, it is almost impossible to divorce the subject from its licentious subtext, if you can get a subtext under a tight-fitting corset. Unlacing and deboning are, of course, a sensory precursor to sexual activity. There is a persistent sense that a woman in a corset is courting some fiasco or fall. Take the case of one bride in Paris in the 1580s, quoted in Steele's book, who, "being too bound and compressed in her wedding dress, came from the altar after having taken bread and wine in the accustomed manner, thinking to return to her place, fell rigidly dead from suffocation. She was buried the same day in the same church." A few days later the grieving groom married the woman who would have been his mother-in-law. In the next century stern moralists inveighed against "streight-lacing", with John Bulwer blaming it for "a stinking breath", "consumptions" and "a withering Rottennesse". Today, professional moralists and medics blame cigarettes for exactly the same set of ills: linking pain and pleasure, naughty and nice, risk and sensual reward in a way that would have been familiar to 17th century anti-corsetry campaigners. Much as today's anti-smoking lobby seems powerless to prevent widespread tobacco use, corsets increased in popularity. The 19th century saw a flowering of sub-genres of corsetry: sporting corsets, rustproof corsets, male orsets and corset-related sexual literature concerning mysterious establishments called tight-lacing schools, which tended to be located on the outskirts of such morally suspect capitals as Vienna and Paris. But there was a backlash, too. "Burn the corsets!" was the uncompromisingly militant message of 1870s feminist Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. "Make a bonfire of the cruel steels that have lorded it over your thorax and abdomen and heave a sigh of relief." In the 20th century, designers from Paul Poiret to Coco Chanel might reasonably have claimed to have delivered women from the incarceration of corsetry, yet it was soon back: boned dresses were the foundation of Dior's New Look. With his creation of a satin evening gown with a laced corset-style back, Jacques Fath seems to have L prefigured the way today's designers - including Gaultier, Lacroix, Chalayan and McQueen -use certain corsetry desien cues as external, visible and controversially decorative features, rather than merely the means to create the requisite body shape for the garment. The primary appeal of the corset, now, is in the visibility of its own form; a concept that was captured in the title the Metropolitan Museum of Art gave to its costume exhibition: Extreme Beauty: The Body Transformed. That transformation can be manipulated in different ways. From Rigby & Peller's corsetry to trashylingerie.com's saucier versions, the tone today is pretty, flattering and foxy. Then, if you happen to be staging a fashion show, a garment with some corsetry architecture is usually the item that raises cheers, applause and intensifies the popping of flashbulbs from the press photographers' enclosure at the bottom of the catwalk. Julien MacDonald, in his high-glamour, autumn-winter show at London Fashion Week, whipped up a frenzy with a leather ball gown and a skin-tight black leather catsuit, both of which evinced corset-style lacing. In different hands, manipulated by the skilful fingers of Stefano Dolce and Domenico Gabbana, the corset's overt, hard-edged sexuality gives way to something softer, more subtly wistful and culturally evocative, as we'll be seeing all summer. corsetted.com webmistress says: My main gripe about this article (other than the atrocious spelling), is the comparison of corset wearing to cigarette smoking. I get the feeling that the writer is trying to make smoking look not as bad as it is. The hundreds of diseases attributed to the corset way back when ranged from hysteria to tuberculosis to consumption. Thats nothing like the diseases that have been scientifically proven to be related to smoking (emphysema, lung cancer, COPD, throat cancer, etc...) Not to mention the damages that second hand smoke has on bystanders (childhood asthma, just to name one). I've never heard of anybody getting hurt from second hand corset wearing.