I’m well into a meze spread at Ayat, a favorite Palestinian restaurant in Manhattan’s East Village, when I get a stitch in my side. The pressure building and building, I look at my friend and sigh: “I’ll be right back,” I say, before racing to the bathroom for an emergency adjustment to the corset I’m wearing.
A few weeks before, I had been talking to Kylie Jenner’s stylists, sisters Alexandra and Mackenzie Grandquist, about fashion’s 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. “You can just throw one on with a T-shirt to go out to lunch.”
Jenner’s 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’s in shapely company: Hailey Bieber wore her own take on the corset for a recent girls night out, Sabrina Carpenter wore a variety of bedazzled full-body versions throughout her Short n’ Sweet tour, Jessie Buckley turned to a torso-size waspie while promoting The Bride!, and Bad Bunny made history at the Grammys in an hourglass-fitted custom Schiaparelli corseted tuxedo.
Valerie Steele, chief curator of The Museum at Manhattan’s Fashion Institute of Technology, called the corset—long derided as anti-feminist and imprisoning—“probably the most controversial garment in the history of fashion” in her 2001 book The Corset: A Cultural History. A quarter century later, she notes that, while we may be light-years away from the rigid conformity of the corset’s Victorian heyday, many of us simply constrict ourselves in different ways.
“Women didn’t stop wearing corsets,” she says. “They just internalized them in the form of diet, exercise, liposuction, tummy tucks, and, recently, Ozempic.” 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’s Hospital for Special Surgery, which help a range of spinal issues including scoliosis.)
“Corsetry today,” Steele continues, “is very I’m powerful, I’m sexy.” Steele cites Matières Fécales founders Hannah Rose Dalton and Steven Raj Bhaskaran’s Paris Fashion Week show—which featured more than 15 hourglass silhouettes on an array of different bodies—as a pivotal moment in reclaiming both the waist and the corset.
Illisa, the mononymous owner of Illisa’s Vintage Lingerie, whose clients at her Sutton Place boutique over the years have included Gaultier and Azzedine Alaïa (and—full disclosure—me), says that any time a new historically rooted drama (Wuthering Heights, Bridgerton) 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—a front closure, say, for those of us who live alone, along with construction-grade steel boning (midcentury corsets generally use celluloid-plastic boning)—and even more intense options.
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