I Don’t Need to Wear a Corset

“Often, when you read old interviews, actresses will say, ‘I don’t need to wear a corset,’ but you look at their photograph and you go, ‘Babe, you are so wearing a corset.’”
 — In an article boldly called “Everything You Know About Corsets Is False,” Valerie Steele, the director/curator of The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology and the author of The Corset: A Cultural History, waves a knowing finger at starlets of the early 1900s. (The corset : ladies of the early 1900s :: plastic surgery : ladies of today?) The piece also links to a lovely and straightforward site called the Antique Corset Gallery, if your fascination with corsets is rivaled only by your fascination with websites about corsets.