She is not alone among moderns in her revival of what Valerie Steele, the director and chief curator of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, called "probably the most controversial garment in the entire history of fashion" in her book "The Corset: A Cultural History" Yale University Press, 2001."Plenty of designers occasionally put a corset in their collections, but I'd say 99 percent of people choose Spanx as an undergarment," said Dr. Steele, who credits the punks and Vivienne Westwood in the 1970s for giving the corset "the charisma of deviance" and Jean-Paul Gaultier in the '80s Madonna wore his corset onstage for "making underwear as outerwear significant."Dr. Steele said that designers tend to interpret corsets in two ways: either they're "fierce, dominatrix, S & M-inspired" or "romantic, glamorous and belle epoch." Only the hourglass shape remains constant. "A small waist is a signifier of nubile femininity and fertility," Dr. Steele said.
Alexis Lass, a former dominatrix in New York who wrote about her experiences in "The Posh Girl's Guide to Play" Seal Press, 2013, has a collection of more than 50 corsets. "Feminists have protested that the cinching of the waist is an ugly example of suffering for 'beauty,' but I find waist cinching to be physically and emotionally empowering," Ms. Lass said, though she has her limits: "I've yet to go to Starbucks in my Marie Antoinette corset."Whether medically sound or not opinions are mixed, and Ms. Chrisman seeks to debunk the taboos, celebrities, including Jessica Alba and Kourtney Kardashian, have worn corsetlike garments after pregnancy to help recover their figures. Scarlett Johansson wears a white corset on the cover of the December issue of Vogue México. And Dita von Teese, the burlesque star, appears in a scarlet corset and little else on her business card.
Ms. von Teese wrote in an email: "People ask if it's comfortable, and I try to explain that it's like wearing a very high heel. There is discipline involved, and of course, the quality of the construction is paramount to comfort." Her collection includes examples from the revered corsetmaker Mr. Pearl, who has collaborated with Mr. Gaultier and Alexander McQueen.Cindy Sibilsky, the producer of a musical based on Xaviera Hollander's memoir "The Happy Hooker," likes to throw a suit jacket over a corset. "The modern-day woman wears a corset on the outside as a symbol of her sexual liberation, power and prowess rather than the traditional idea of the corset as a tool of repression and restriction," she said.