The corsets I wore in The Railway Children are still in my undies drawer, a prized relic of my favourite film.
- Dinah Sheridan
Actors love mental disorders, dialects, and corsets. Give them one of the three and they’re happy.
- Robin Tunney
A woman in a corset is a lie, a falsehood, a fiction, but for us, this fiction is better than the reality
- Eugine Chapus
So wearing a corset certainly changes your state of mind.
- Radha Mitchell
What is it about corsets that so fascinates costume historians and fetishists alike?
For more than 500 years, women and occasionally men rigidly laced themselves up in whalebone or steel in order to be molded into some sort of physical ideal.
Consider the work of contemporary designers such as Gaultier and Lacroix, and it becomes apparent that this strange obsession continues to this day.
While there is no shortage of information on this fashion curiosity, Steele here emphasizes the aesthetic, social, and historical aspects.
As chief curator of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York and the author of nearly 12 books on costume history, she is well qualified to tackle the subject and to attempt to answer “why.”
- Review of The Corset: A Cultural History, at Amazon.com
