The Tamesis
I got stitches in my side while eating appetizers at Ayat, a favorite Palestinian restaurant in Manhattan’s East Village. The pressure was building and I looked at my friend and sighed, “I’ll be right back,” I said, running to the bathroom to make an emergency adjustment to the corset I was wearing.
A few weeks ago, I had been chatting with sisters Alexandra and Mackenzie Grandquist, Kylie Jenner’s stylists, about fashion’s rediscovered obsession with waists, when they let me in on a little secret. Corsets have more uses than you think, McKenzie says, adding that they’re no longer just for sculpting your body during high-stakes events. “You could just throw on a T-shirt and go out to lunch.”
Jenner’s own collection, they tell me, includes custom pieces from couture corsetry legend Mr. Pearl (which took a year and multiple fittings in his London studio to perfect) and some Jean Paul Gaultier’s Wasp line (a waist-only version of the garment). She’s hanging out with the shapely ones: Hailey Bieber wore a self-designed corset on a recent girls’ night out, and Sabrina Carpenter donned a dizzying array of full-body versions short and sweet Jessie Buckley transforms into a torso-sized wasp while on tour bride! , Bad Bunny made history at the Grammy Awards wearing an hourglass-shaped custom Schiaparelli corset.
In her 2001 book, Valerie Steele, chief curator of the Museum of Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan, called the corset, long derided as anti-feminist and incarcerating, “perhaps the most controversial garment in the history of fashion.” The Corset: A Cultural History. A quarter of a century later, she points out that while we may still be light-years away from the strict conformity of the Victorian corset’s heyday, many of us are simply limiting ourselves in different ways.
“Women haven’t stopped wearing corsets,” she said. “They’ve just internalized them in the form of diet, exercise, liposuction, tummy tucks and, most recently, Ozempic.” Freed from oppressive practicality, corsets themselves are now an option for all body types and make an entirely different statement. (Of course, sometimes, a corset can resolve pain rather than cause it, such as the custom braces made at Manhattan’s Hospital for Special Surgery that can help treat a range of spinal problems, including scoliosis.)
“Today’s corsets,” Steele continued, “are very I’m strong, I’m sexy.Steele cited Matières Fécales founders Hannah Rose Dalton and Steven Raj Bhaskaran’s Paris Fashion Week show – which showcased a range of different bodies in more than 15 hourglass silhouettes – as a pivotal moment in reclaiming the waist and the corset.
Illisa is the eponymous owner of Illisa’s Vintage Lingerie, and her Sutton Place boutique’s clients over the years have included Gaultier and Azzedine Alaïa (and – full disclosure – me).Wuthering Heights, Bridgerton) developed a fan base and business surged. But while her store has recently seen sales of classic corsets with hook-and-eye closures, contemporary iterations bring simple updates—like front closures, for those of us who live alone, and architectural-grade steel boning (medieval corsets often used celluloid plastic boning)—or even stronger options.
