Corset’s History
In the 1920’s, with the straight “garçonne” silhouette, the corsets became rarer and rarer and they were used only to reduce the hip, while the bust was supported by bras and flattened by sashes or products specially developed for this. The corset ended up limited to the fantasy and to the fetish during most of the XX century. In the 1950’s, when the New Look of Dior valued the pylon waist again, only lightly reinforced sashes of elastic cloth were worn. But between the late 1970’s and the 1980’s, fashion designers as Vivienne Westwood and Jean-Paul Gaultier would bring to the outerwear those very elements of fantasy and fetish, specially of BDSM. Leather, vinyl, latex, chains, and guess what, corsets. The punk and gothic alternative fashion incorporated the corset like basic element. From the 1990’s forward the corset became couture, and it isn’t uncommon finding one or two of them in each collection the great fashion designers and in the covers of “Vogue”.
Though (and perhaps exactly because) it has stopped being a basic piece, the corset never died. Whether for its capacity of modifying the body, restricting and disciplining, or just for the aesthetic attraction that it provokes, the corset will be always alive, if not in the fashion, at least in the fantasy of its admirers.
