Alternately enslaving or enticing

Corset's popularity has gone up and down for centuries.

Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service; 1/2/2002; White, Jackie

It was once considered an instrument of torture and even death. It was used as an orthopedic device in the 16th century and was a sign of high status in the Victorian age.

The corset. Millions felt Scarlett O'Hara's pain when she was squeezed into one in the film "Gone With the Wind." And while the traditional lace-up undergarment started to fade from fashion in the 20th century, women still felt society's pressure to whittle down their bodies with corset-like garments.

Major designers have consistently been inspired by the construction. In recent years, the corset has been reincarnated by the likes of Chanel's Karl Lagerfeld, Gucci's Tom Ford, Versace, Christian Lacroix, Vivienne Westwood and America's Nicole Miller.

Madonna was never sexier than when she wore Jean-Paul Gaultier's rendition for her Blonde Ambition tour in `90-`91. When Nicole Kidman wore it in "Moulin Rouge" last year, she touched off a new burst of interest. It swamped the fashion runways yet again.

It's an alluring idea. Never mind that you may need a dresser to lace you up and the stamina to hold everything in for several hours. It was probably no accident that Victorian women were considered "up tight."

So what's so intriguing about the garment that it has endured for more than 400 years?

It is sexy and the ultimate in femininity. But it was to our ancestors what control-top garments and StairMasters have been to us.

Writing in her new book, ``The Corset: A Cultural History'' (Yale University Press, $39.95), fashion historian Valerie Steele calls the corset the most "controversial garment in the entire history of fashion." It has been both a symbol of women's oppression and an icon of sexual eroticism.

Steele, the chief curator and acting director of the Museum at New York's Fashion Institute of Technology, says her fascination with the corset was the reason she chose to study fashion history. Early in her graduate school years at Yale, she heard a classmate discussing the garment as a reflection of women's oppression and eroticism.

She chose to do her thesis on "The Erotic Aspect of Victorian Fashion," which included a significant chapter on corsets. Her fifth book was on fetishes, which again included corsets. She mounted a corset exhibition at the fashion institute two years ago. Now, almost 20 years after she started studying the subject, her book on corsets has been published.

The earliest corsets were thought to be made of steel or copper rings. Early in the 16th century, corsets in cloth or lace with rigid whalebone were fashioned by tailors mostly for aristocratic women. Some, made of metal and hinged at the side, were apparently used by surgeons as orthopedic instruments to straighten the body, Steele writes.

But the health benefits were questionable. Just as society today blames the lean, waif-like image of the fashion model for the pervasiveness of anorexia in young women, the corset was implicated in the deaths of many young women in the 16th century. It was said to cause all sorts of physical grievances, including cancer and displacement of internal organs by pressing the lungs, muscles, bones and arteries.

The practice of lacing the garments tightly is depicted in art and political satire through the centuries, Steele's book notes. They were drawn so firmly, women generally had to hold on to something and sometimes appeared to be writhing in pain. In the 19th century, an American writer noted that "not one woman in 100 has avoided the wasp-waist mania."

As the corset evolved, the rigidity and style differed from country to country, Steele says. The French began to loosen their stays. The English women drew the laces tighter.

By the late 1800s modern clothing became simpler and looser, so the garment softened with linen stays and no boning. The high-waisted silhouette came into fashion, so women emphasized the bust more than the waist, and the corset waned.

The popularity of the tightly laced corset tended to rise and fall until the early 20th century, when boning was diminished. The confining, body-shaping garment faded as designers such as Paul Poiret and Madeleine Vionnet urged women into a freer, looser silhouette. World War I required the steel from corsets be requisitioned for the war effort. The women's suffrage movement and the arrival of the flapper helped to loosen the tyranny of the corset as an undergarment.

Steele argues that it never really disappeared. It only evolved into other kinds of confining garments. The `20s brought an obsession with thin bodies, and women were no less eager to fit the mode then than they are now. The `30s brought the panty girdle. And Steele says that the focus on exercise, hard bodies, liposuction and dieting of the late 20th century is merely another form of the corset mentality.

Steele notes that the corset comes and goes in fashion every two or three years. Not long ago Gaultier even packaged his perfume in a bottle shaped like a female torso bound in a steel corset. In short, despite an association with anti-feminism, the frequent discomfort and the difficulty of dressing oneself without enlisting help, the garment shows little sign of disappearing in the 21st century.

Figure it out.

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COPYRIGHT 2002 Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service