Kim Kardashian's Korset

The 2019 Met Gala’s theme was based on the Susan Sontag essay “Notes on Camp,” and the celebrity attendees had a broad range of interpretations. The look that caused the most controversy was worn by the reality TV star Kim Kardashian, in a Thierry Mugler dress and Mr. Pearl corset. Rather than focus on the design, the first for Mugler since 2002, or how the dress fit into the theme, critics instead chose to focus on the corset and repeat a rhetoric about the controversial garment that has been recurrent for over a hundred years. There is a long tradition of opposition to corsets, including claims that the accessory is bad for the health of the wearer, that corsets are unnatural, and that they are anti-feminist. This article explores the history of corsets, health, popular culture, and fashion, using Kardashian as a contemporary source of examination. Kardashian’s body is a site of controversy, much like corsets, as she wears and sells shapewear. The critique of Kardashian’s use of modern shapewear reflects a long tradition of controlling women’s bodies through dress reform and medical intervention, a debate the Met Gala dress reignited.

As Nature Formed It: Venus Sculptures and the ‘Natural’ Waistline in Dress Reform Discourse

In the second half of the nineteenth century, ancient sculptures of Venus became models for the ‘natural’ waistline. Drawings of the Venus de Medici or de Milo were popular in texts published by American dress reformers, who advocated for the rejection of corsets and tight-lacing. This article takes as its subject these drawings and their simultaneous signification of multiple bodies: a specific sculpture, an idealized form, the ‘natural’ form of any female torso, and the supposedly superior physicality of the ancient Greeks. It argues that the elision of these various bodies is facilitated by the treatment of ancient sculptures as ‘truth-to-nature’ representations — images that are simultaneously ideal and faithful to the form produced by nature. This understanding is encouraged by drawings of the statues, which imply the comparability of sculpture and body. In this way, the sculptures enter dress reform discourse, serving as both a faithful representative of a now-lost ancient body and a kind of visual lexicon by which living women might revive ancient aesthetic and moral perfection. As constructions of aspirational physical ideals, the sculptures and the drawings of Venus are enlisted in a developing and deeply charged visualization of white American womanhood.

The Kurious Kase of Kim Kardashian's Korset

The 2019 Met Gala’s theme was based on the Susan Sontag essay “Notes on Camp,” and the celebrity attendees had a broad range of interpretations. The look that caused the most controversy was worn by the reality TV star Kim Kardashian, in a Thierry Mugler dress and Mr. Pearl corset. Rather than focus on the design, the first for Mugler since 2002, or how the dress fit into the theme, critics instead chose to focus on the corset and repeat a rhetoric about the controversial garment that has been recurrent for over a hundred years. There is a long tradition of opposition to corsets, including claims that the accessory is bad for the health of the wearer, that corsets are unnatural, and that they are anti-feminist. This article explores the history of corsets, health, popular culture, and fashion, using Kardashian as a contemporary source of examination. Kardashian’s body is a site of controversy, much like corsets, as she wears and sells shapewear. The critique of Kardashian’s use of modern shapewear reflects a long tradition of controlling women’s bodies through dress reform and medical intervention, a debate the Met Gala dress reignited.

‘The Artistic Aspect of Dress’: The Story of the Healthy and Artistic Dress Union

This article presents a short biography of the Healthy and Artistic Dress Union, a dress reform society formed in 1890 with the aim of ‘teaching both men and women how to discriminate by choosing and rejecting, and so gradually moulding the exigencies of our climate and situation, the claims of artistic arrangement of drapery, and harmony of colour’. It presents a new account of the group that goes beyond previous discussions, which have been solely gleaned from the group's journal Aglaia. A brief history of the organization under the leadership of artists such as Henry Holiday, Walter Crane and G. F. Watts will precede an examination of their 1896 Exhibition of Living Pictures, and a discussion of their educational journal Aglaia and its later iteration The Dress Review, illustrating the creative production and philosophy of Artistic Dress from this later period in its history.

Breathing for Nerve Force, Posing for Poise

Chapter 3 examines the relationship between lingering harmonial ideas and the nineteenth-century evolution of physical culture. Specifically it relates the development of Ling Swedish gymnastics, the Movement Cure, and American Delsarteism with the rise of alternative medical therapies and gender dynamics. In doing so, it points to two trends that speak to modern yoga’s form as well as its gender demographics. First, modern yoga—especially the vastly popular dance-like flow styles—looks most like the light calisthenics that would have been prescribed for women during this period. Second, these types of calisthenics were elaborated to address distinctly feminine concerns, such as dress reform, which led to a special focus being placed on elements that would become central to modern yoga practice in the West, namely a generalized emphasis on deep breathing (rather than the more specific techniques of pranayama) and attention to aesthetic form.