CORSETS MAKE A COMEBACK

St. Louis Post-Dispatch; 4/8/2000; Becky Homan; Post-Dispatch Fashion Editor

STUDENTS AT Washington University are stitching up new ones.
Curators at New York's Fashion Institute of Technology are displaying the old.

And in between, everyone from a St. Louis bookstore to an Italian team of fashion designers is focusing on them.
The subject is corsets.
You thought they were long gone, except for, say, the costumes of Madonna on her "Blond Ambition" tour?
Nope.
The corset is making a comeback. Not as "some torturous device to change the figure" but as "a design element" in beautiful new women's evening clothes, says Jeigh Singleton, head of Washington University's fashion-design program.
He points to Italy's celebrated design team of Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana, who feature corsets as bodices on pale blue and lavender, floral-print gowns in their spring 2000 collection.
Last year, another prominent Italian, Gianfranco Ferre, applied black stitched corsets to the bodices of his red-satin evening frocks.
And any number of American prom and juniors dressmakers have followed suit this year, with little lace-up, corset-like elements on gowns made just for teen girls.
Corsets are so much of an influence now that Singleton has challenged students in his fashion program to design and make new corseted cocktail dresses, just in time for the annual student fashion show, scheduled this year for 7:30 p.m. May 7 at the Saint Louis Galleria (call 314-935-9090 for more information).
"Up to this time, the whole emphasis on corsetry in late 20th-century fashion has been in stretch fabrics," Singleton says.
"And as a result of all the Lycra/spandex, close-to-the-body clothes" that have been in vogue for several years, he adds, the female form once again is the key inspiration for many designers.
But not every garment is stretched to the max. Designers who are returning to "woven fabric need some structure to duplicate the shape of the body," Singleton says. Some of them are going -- especially in evening clothes -- for the comfort of intricately stitched corset looks that have zipper or button closures with only the illusion of lacing. Indeed, this is one of the challenges he's put to his students.
But Singleton says the corset now goes far beyond fashion and has become a symbol of the power that women have over their own sexuality, "as opposed to its symbol of suppression of women -- before women's rights."
Valerie Steele is the curator of "The Corset: Fashioning the Body," a major exhibit at F.I.T. in New York, which runs through April 22. "The corset is the most controversial item of clothing in the entire history of fashion, and it's usually perceived as a symbol of women's suppression," she says.
But once it disappeared as the essential foundation item in the 1920s, women -- and some designers -- began to see the corset as "an icon of erotic femininity," says Steele.
So, the corset returned. Then came the explosion of "underwear as outerwear" in the 1980s. And Madonna fanned those flames.
Feminine evening corsets are a more recent signature of designer Ferre, as well as Christian Lacroix, Karl Lagerfeld for Chanel, John Galliano for Dior, Yves Saint Laurent and Dolce & Gabbana.
"Fierce corsets" is how Steele describes "equally sexy ones but designed in the style of the femme fatale" by the likes of Jean-Paul Gaultier, Alexander McQueen and the house of Versace.
And then there are the corsets favored by pure lovers of art.
Barry Leibman, a co-owner of Left Bank Books in the Central West End, is one of them.
At a Washington U. show last year that exhibited the work of painting and sculpture students, Leibman says, he fell in love with a silver-wire corset sculpture.
It was by Hilary Williams, now a graduate living in Sheridan, Wyo. "I thought it was really unique," Leibman says of the airy, feminine shape. "I asked her if she wanted to do a show, and she said she'd be delighted."
In the month before she left St. Louis, Williams made 14 more wire interpretations of a corseted female form.
Called "Collections of Constraint," the exhibit continues at the bookstore, 399 North Euclid Avenue, through April 16.
"We have a strong feminist background in this store," says Leibman, "and I thought it would be just a great exhibit for women's history month."

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