\n<\/p>\n
I\u2019m well into a meze spread at Ayat, a favorite Palestinian restaurant in Manhattan\u2019s East Village, when I get a stitch in my side. The pressure building and building, I look at my friend and sigh: \u201cI\u2019ll be right back,\u201d I say, before racing to the bathroom for an emergency adjustment to the corset I\u2019m wearing.<\/p>\n
A few weeks before, I had been talking to Kylie Jenner<\/a>\u2019s stylists, sisters Alexandra and Mackenzie Grandquist, about fashion\u2019s rediscovered obsession with the waist when they clued me in on a little secret. Corsets are under more outfits than you would believe, Mackenzie said, adding they are no longer just used to shape figures for high-stakes events. \u201cYou can just throw one on with a T-shirt to go out to lunch.\u201d<\/p>\n Jenner\u2019s own collection, they tell me, includes a bespoke creation by couture-corset legend Mr. Pearl (which took a year and multiple fittings in his London atelier to perfect) and a handful of Jean Paul Gaultier waspies (waist-only versions of the garment). She\u2019s in shapely company: Hailey Bieber wore her own take on the corset<\/a> for a recent girls night out, Sabrina Carpenter wore a variety of bedazzled full-body versions<\/a> throughout her Short n\u2019 Sweet<\/em> tour, Jessie Buckley turned to a torso-size waspie while promoting The Bride!,<\/em> and Bad Bunny made history at the Grammys in an hourglass-fitted custom Schiaparelli corseted tuxedo<\/a>.<\/p>\n Valerie Steele<\/a>, chief curator of The Museum at Manhattan\u2019s Fashion Institute of Technology, called the corset\u2014long derided as anti-feminist and imprisoning\u2014\u201cprobably the most controversial garment in the history of fashion\u201d in her 2001 book The Corset: A Cultural History.<\/em> A quarter century later, she notes that, while we may be light-years away from the rigid conformity of the corset\u2019s Victorian heyday, many of us simply constrict ourselves in different ways.<\/p>\n \u201cWomen didn\u2019t stop wearing corsets,\u201d she says. \u201cThey just internalized them in the form of diet, exercise, liposuction, tummy tucks, and, recently, Ozempic.\u201d Freed of their repressive practicality, corsets themselves are now an option for all kinds of body types and make an entirely different statement. (And sometimes, of course, corsets can solve pain rather than inflict it, as with the bespoke braces made at Manhattan\u2019s Hospital for Special Surgery, which help a range of spinal issues including scoliosis.)<\/p>\n \u201cCorsetry today,\u201d Steele continues, \u201cis very I\u2019m powerful, I\u2019m sexy.<\/em>\u201d Steele cites Mati\u00e8res F\u00e9cales<\/a> founders Hannah Rose Dalton and Steven Raj Bhaskaran\u2019s Paris Fashion Week show\u2014which featured more than 15 hourglass silhouettes on an array of different bodies\u2014as a pivotal moment in reclaiming both the waist and the corset.<\/p>\n Illisa, the mononymous owner of Illisa\u2019s Vintage Lingerie, whose clients at her Sutton Place boutique over the years have included Gaul\u00adtier and Azzedine Ala\u00efa (and\u2014full disclosure\u2014me), says that any time a new historically rooted drama (Wuthering Heights, Bridgerton<\/em>) develops a fan base, business skyrockets. But while her shop has lately seen a run on classic corsets with hook and eye closures, contemporary iterations come with both easy updates\u2014a front closure, say, for those of us who live alone, along with construction-grade steel boning (midcentury corsets generally use celluloid-\u200bplastic boning)\u2014\u200band even more intense options.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n