The Reclamation of the Corset

 THE YEAR WAS 2003. I was a punky little pre-teen in rock-obsessed Bangalore who was nowhere near confi­dent enough to own her obsession with girl-pop yet. But while I was listening to Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera in the shadows (or at low volume), I found a gateway girl musician who married the music I loved with one of the more ‘socially accepted’ music genres in my city— Avril Lavigne. Lavigne had a rebel­lious pink streak in her hair, wore combat boots and played electric guitar–and she could rock a corset with grungy, low-rise jeans while she did it.

I’d probably seen the corset being worn in myriad forms well before Avril Lavigne. Britney and Madonna wore them often. Madonna even sired that very particular style of duchess-satin Jean Paul Gaultier conical-bra corset that took the world by storm in the early ’90s. Well before Lavigne was wearing her ribbed, black corsets in the mid-2000s, Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss were walking them down Vivienne Westwood runways, such as her 1990 show ‘Portrait’. Sarah Jessica Parker was smoking at the window in them in her Upper East Side studio on Sex & The City, and burlesque star Dita Von Teese had practically adopted them as her uniform.

The corset, in fashion, was not new. But Lavigne’s corset represented some­thing different. It heralded the entrance of the corset into its cultural renaissance; one that coloured outside the lines of the classically feminine. Now, two decades after she wore her corseted, striped dress (with skull detailing) at the 2004 World Music Awards, the corset has untied ev­ery string restricting its reach and moved into an era of agency.

The roots of the corset are undeni­ably patriarchal. Look at its long history, starting in 1600 BCE Minoan Crete, and you’ll find it spent centuries interlaced with the male gaze. The ancient Greek figurines show women wearing tightly fitted bodices that exposed the breasts and cinched the waist. In the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, the European corset followed, and women wore fitted garments reinforced with materials like paste, reeds, or stiffened linen to mold the torso. By the 16th century, baleen (made from the jaws of whales) became the base material for corset stays, and the garment soon became popular with the European aristocracy, courtesy the portrayal of Catherine de’ Medici in France.

Even the very origin of the word ascribes to the male desire for petite wom­en, with the etymology being the Old French phrase (diminutive of cors ‘body’) for ‘the little body’. The corset did change shape, from a flat, elongated torso with a conical shape in the 16th–17th century to the curvier silhouettes we associate with the 19th century and on. But the idea was always to regulate the female body (despite some 17th century men wearing them for better posture).

Though the corset changed fabrics, boning material and structure, at its spine was still the purpose of reining in the female form. The discomfort and restric­tion of corsets were often reframed as virtues; proof that women were willing to endure hardship to achieve beauty and social status. The wider hips and lifted bust of the 18th-century corset projected fertility and ‘womanliness’, while the hourglass figure of the 19th-century corset symbolised a delicate, ornamental femininity; especially when contrasted with men’s unshaped ‘active’ clothing. But regardless of era, it maintained control over women’s bodies; both from a comfort and an aesthetic perspective.

The instinct, then, is to wonder how this garment had the revival it did. Accord­ing to Lavanya Aneja, founder of the corset-focused label Lea Clothing Co., decenter­ing men as a focus played a large part. “Social media has so much discourse about how women would dress much ‘sexier’ if it weren’t for men. What that reveals is a shift in how women choose clothing. And now more than ever, women are dressing for themselves–and each other.”

Celebrity stylist Amandeep Kaur will often choose to dress her clients in corsets, because she loves what it does for the female form, from a purely sartorial point of view. “The way the boning structure sculpts the torso is stunning, and the kinds of corsets I work with are easy to wear, letting the wearer slide into it comfortably and elevating their look.” To her, if a corset is uncomfortable in today’s day and age, it’s a skill issue. “There’ a degree of expertise you need to make the right kind of corset.”

 The core of the apple of today’s design is comfort. Historically a garment was designed to change the shape of the female form, the corset of today does the opposite; it works with it. The garment is no longer intended to be the torso equivalent of lotus shoe footbinding. It is crafted across sizes and materials not just to work for any woman’s body, but to mould it in a manner that makes the wearing experience enjoyable.

“My goal was always to create clothing that would accentuate Indian women’s bodies,” says Aneja. “The corset can really flatter a curvier frame if you add support and shaping. When I tried a corset for the first time, I loved how it made me feel about my curves, and I wanted the designs we put out to bottle that feeling.”

Kaur loves the take that brands like That Antiquepiece by Yash Patil, Bloni Atelier and Polite Society have on the style. “Corsets have run the gamut of styles over the years, and these brands still have an original POV on them. Some of my favourite iterations of corset in general over the years have been the classic lace (which never goes out of style), that can be styled as a top or over a white shirt, streetwear corsets that work best with baggy jeans or cargo pants and the underbust corset belt (that you can use to sculpt a blazer or a saree).” She also has a soft corner for the ones with zero boning that are as comfortable to wear as a structured top. “Those are especially great for dailywear.”

The corset has been exciting in how it has constantly bust out of conven­tion and into the zeitgeist. Every few seasons in fashion, we see the corset take a new form–from the corsetry of Kim Kardashian’s Thierry Mugler drip­ping wet gown at the 2019 Met Gala, to Schiaparelli’s 2022 edit of corsets that constantly found its way to the red car­pet, Ferragamo’s custom-made leather corsets (2023), or Tarun Tahiliani’s royalty-inspired edit for Janhvi Kapoor at Cannes 2025.

Aneja is obsessed with its versatility; enough to have built her brand around it. “In our (approximately) five years, Lea has had a lot of fun with corsets, while prioritising comfort. Reimagining the silhouette for Indian wear in particular has been new. We were arguably the first label to do corset-style blouses in 2021; a style that was a hit with our audience and quickly graduated to the mainstream.”

The corset has enough history and nuance to fill a book; but what is most fascinating about it to me is how it has transitioned in who it serves. From be­ing a clear marker of male control over women’s bodies, it has evolved over the years to being both by and for women, with many women-led labels and wom­en designers reimagining it through their collections. What has helped that evolution along is a change of approach; redesigning it to be more comfortable in every way possible–from the materials being used to make them, to structuring them across shapes and sizes. Customi­sation, zero-boning corsets, breathable fabrics, varied styling choices–each contributes to shedding the garment’s patriarchal origins and being reclaimed by women who don’t want to alter or reconstruct their bodies, but instead to truly revel in them.