Corsets

Kylie Minogue is just one of the more famous women to use corsets to enhance her looks.

The earliest corsets arrived in the 13th-century, and it took us seven centuries to break out of them. One might, therefore, expect the very notion of corseting to be filed next to foot-binding as an example of history’s curious sartorial enslavement of women. The effect, after all, was an array of physical problems that one might broadly describe as “squishing the innards”. Tales abound of welts, fainting, even of unborn foetuses crippled in the womb. …

However, the basic appeal of the corset, Morris elaborates, is that it exaggerates the magic ratio of waist to hips, which for women is 7:10. “

The big squeeze