The Main Squeeze: Have Corset, Go Figure

By Ariella Budick. STAFF WRITER

INHALE DEEPLY and let the air fill your lungs. Then imagine trying to
breathe with a metal cage hooked around your ribs. Countless women did just
that for centuries, when they submitted themselves to fashion's command and
strapped on, laced up or hooked together their corsets.

This controversial item of female attire is the subject of "The Corset:
Fashioning the Body," a gripping exhibit at the Fashion Institute of Technology
that speaks to viewers' bodies even more potently than to their eyes. We
cannot look at this hideously confining underwear without imagining its
pressure bearing down on our own flesh. The three centuries' worth of corsets
on display elicited involuntary groans from almost everyone in the gallery-male
and female.

But the show is much more than a straightforward history of the corset.
Organized by Valerie Steele, a cultural historian, the show delves into
lingerie's social meaning. Steele points out that while dress reformers
demonized the corset as a tool of self-mutilation, its physical dangers have
been consistently exaggerated. Still, the debate continues about the extent to
which sexy confections made of ribbon, lace, whalebone and metal have acted as
instruments of oppression.

The funnel-shaped "Iron Corset" from 16th-Century Europe, with its
crisscrossing armature and freakishly small waist, ensured that its wearer
would suffer. And according to Steele, comfort always took a backseat to
considerations of fashion and social rank. Corsets conferred status: Only women
with servants could afford to wear an accessory that so severely inhibited
movement, like housework. By holding up the breasts and minimizing the waist,
the stiff undergarments also appealed to vanity and to the age-old desire to
look younger and more feminine.

The corset could paradoxically signal both abandon and restraint. As
articles of intimate apparel, they intimated sex and the pleasures of
undressing. At the same time, though, the long columns of hooks and laces
functioned as symbols of uprightness and even prudery.

At the height of their popularity in the last two decades of the 19th
Century, corsets were fashioned in a rainbow of colors, bedecked with ribbons
and embroidery. By the early 20th Century they began to disappear, replaced by
more comfortable stretch garments, and, as Steele points out, by new regimes of
diet, exercise and plastic surgery.

The question of whether corsets embrace or incarcerate the figure has taken
on a new relevance in the last few decades, as designers have returned to them
for inspiration. Madonna remade herself as a modern amazon sheathed in a gold
lamé corset with menacing, conical breasts. The ensemble, created by Jean-Paul
Gaultier (and featured prominently in the show), reconfigured an item
stigmatized by feminists into a symbol of female sexual empowerment. Madonna's
corset is still a gate, but it substitutes passive confinement with active
threat, signaling interested partners to advance at their own risk.

Copyright 2000, Newsday Inc.