![]() ![]() ![]() Though tight lacing was probably never so bizarre as cartoons of the day suggest, then as now there was much talk of fashion victims. To some they were no doubt oppressive, although conferring gentility to others, they rendered that matchless sense of being perfectly well dressed. In a handsomely illustrated history of the corset, Valerie Steele, the author of Fifty Years of Fashion (1997) and the editor of the journal Fashion Theory, demonstrates how various were the kinds of corsets, the ways they were worn, and the meanings they conveyed to their wearers. Since the Renaissance, when clothes were first cut and tailored rather than simply draped, aristocratic women-later those of all classes, and men too-improved the body underneath with corsets that affirmed the wearer’s respectability and sex appeal. ![]() Even in the queen’s last moments, uncorseted, her body assumed the posture that tightly laced stays had exacted throughout her life. In all of Vigée Marie Lebrun’s portraits of her, whether in shepherdess muslins or court finery, the breasts are pushed high and the back is proudly straight. $35Īs Marie Antoinette rode in a cart to her execution, hair cropped and hands tied behind her back, the artist Jacques Louis David, who was in the crowd, did a quick, cruel sketch of her in profile, back arched, and bosom thrust forward but drooping as it would not have done had she been wearing a corset. $39.95īy Jane Farrell-Beck and Colleen Gau. ![]()
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