Victoria and Albert museum's new exhibition is big on smalls. It comes at a prescient moment, when fashion is looking to lingerie for inspiration and when the contemporary silhouette is being reshaped by a postmodern corset revival. Alexander Fury looks at what lies beneath.
The Corsetry is experiencing a revival. I don’t mean the exposed sort, the kind of spangled lace-up get-ups sported by Dita von Teese, whittling her waist to 16.5 inches and made to be seen.
Rigby and Peller, whose clientele runs the gamut from Queen Elizabeth to Lady Gaga, strictly admonished my misuse of knicker-nouns: a corset is outerwear there, a basque is the shaping garment underneath. And then there’s shape wear, which is a whole other thing entirely.
The notion that women would be quite so willing to truss themselves up in whalebone, satin and cambric in 2016 seems archaic. Much of it can be traced back to another Rigby and Peller client, Kim Kardashian, who brought the notion of “waist training” to the fore roughly two years ago.
In 2015, in response, the Victoria and Albert museum acquired one of the veritable slew of waist training cinchers that flooded the market. Its is currently on public display in the museums new exhibition, “Undressed: A Brief History of Underwear” - devoted to both underwear and the outerwear its influenced.
It feels like an interloper alongside picturesque brocade eighteenth century stays and ribboned Belle Epoque corsets: by contrast, the waist trainer seems quasi-surgical, simultaneously modern and quaintly old-fashioned.
Which is a good summary for the re-emergence of corsetry, at a time when the term “Feminist” is experiencing a media revival and when the first female president is seeming a distinct possibility. Corsetry and feminism aren’t mutually exclusive: many saw the 1989 Blonde Ambition get-up of Madonna, conical breasts of her Jean Paul Gaultier quilted satin corset piercing through a double-breasted business suit, as an embodiment of a new ball-busting wave of feminists.
Likewise, Vivienne Westwood’s popularising of the basque in the 1980s - an outwear garment based on an underwear style from 200 years prior - as a powerful female call-to-arms, of women ironically re-embracing and celebrating the traditional trappings of femininity without feeling denigrated. The same is true of von Teese and her reclaimed showgirl garb, an exaggerated form of retrograde femininity, a parody, tongue very visibly in cheek.
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