I’m well into a meze spread at Ayat, a favorite Palestinian restaurant in Manhattan’s East Village, when I get a stitch in my side. The pressure building and building, I look at my friend and sigh: “I’ll be right back,” I say, before racing to the bathroom for an emergency adjustment to the corset I’m wearing.
A few weeks before, I had been talking to Kylie Jenner’s stylists, sisters Alexandra and Mackenzie Grandquist, about fashion’s rediscovered obsession with the waist when they clued me in on a little secret. Corsets are under more outfits than you would believe, Mackenzie said, adding they are no longer just used to shape figures for high-stakes events. “You can just throw one on with a T-shirt to go out to lunch.”
Jenner’s own collection, they tell me, includes a bespoke creation by couture-corset legend Mr. Pearl (which took a year and multiple fittings in his London atelier to perfect) and a handful of Jean Paul Gaultier waspies (waist-only versions of the garment). She’s in shapely company: Hailey Bieber wore her own take on the corset for a recent girls night out, Sabrina Carpenter wore a variety of bedazzled full-body versions throughout her Short n’ Sweet tour, Jessie Buckley turned to a torso-size waspie while promoting The Bride!, and Bad Bunny made history at the Grammys in an hourglass-fitted custom Schiaparelli corseted tuxedo.
Valerie Steele, chief curator of The Museum at Manhattan’s Fashion Institute of Technology, called the corset—long derided as anti-feminist and imprisoning—“probably the most controversial garment in the history of fashion” in her 2001 book The Corset: A Cultural History. A quarter century later, she notes that, while we may be light-years away from the rigid conformity of the corset’s Victorian heyday, many of us simply constrict ourselves in different ways.
“Women didn’t stop wearing corsets,” she says. “They just internalized them in the form of diet, exercise, liposuction, tummy tucks, and, recently, Ozempic.” Freed of their repressive practicality, corsets themselves are now an option for all kinds of body types and make an entirely different statement. (And sometimes, of course, corsets can solve pain rather than inflict it, as with the bespoke braces made at Manhattan’s Hospital for Special Surgery, which help a range of spinal issues including scoliosis.)
“Corsetry today,” Steele continues, “is very I’m powerful, I’m sexy.” Steele cites Matières Fécales founders Hannah Rose Dalton and Steven Raj Bhaskaran’s Paris Fashion Week show—which featured more than 15 hourglass silhouettes on an array of different bodies—as a pivotal moment in reclaiming both the waist and the corset.
Illisa, the mononymous owner of Illisa’s Vintage Lingerie, whose clients at her Sutton Place boutique over the years have included Gaultier and Azzedine Alaïa (and—full disclosure—me), says that any time a new historically rooted drama (Wuthering Heights, Bridgerton) develops a fan base, business skyrockets. But while her shop has lately seen a run on classic corsets with hook and eye closures, contemporary iterations come with both easy updates—a front closure, say, for those of us who live alone, along with construction-grade steel boning (midcentury corsets generally use celluloid-plastic boning)—and even more intense options.
On a drizzling, early-spring afternoon, I make my way to Lower Manhattan—to the family-owned Orchard Corset in the Lower East Side and Agent Provocateur in SoHo—in search of the new state of the corset.
Behind their theatrical windows on Orchard Street, owners Peggy and Ralph Bergstein are quietly working in front of stacks upon stacks of boxes bearing handwritten labels—Christian Lacroix Couture Panties, Half Slips XL. Once I tell Peggy what I’m looking for—a manufactured hourglass figure—she takes me to the back room, chooses a few options, and gives my seminude body a glance before lacing me into one of their custom-made satin underbust corsets. Later, across town at Agent Provocateur, I find myself bracing my arms against the walls of the dressing room while a shop assistant yanks on laces like she’s ripping the pull cord on a lawn mower, squeezing almost three inches from my midsection.
I come home with a black mesh waspie from Agent Provocateur and the satin underbust corset from Orchard, with plans to wear them under clothing for the next few weeks (though Erdem’s spring 2026 runway proved that corsetry over clothing can be provocative too). Both pieces make my 1950s merry widow corsets seem like oversized T-shirts. “Looks good, but seems like it would be unpleasant to touch,” my fiancé replies when I send him a dressing room selfie I snuck at Orchard. “How much can you actually do in it?”
It’s easier, perhaps, to list everything I can’t do—pick up my keys when they fall on the floor, say; walk down subway steps without feeling like the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz—and don’t get me started on going to the bathroom. But I’m also magically imbued with the greatest posture of my life—and I’m living proof of what Steele told me earlier: I feel powerful.
Hari Nef agrees. The model and actor was first introduced to waist cinchers by Barbie costume director Jacqueline Durran, though when it came to the film’s press tour, Nef wanted to pay homage to the doll in a more subversive way. “I had a custom corset made that gave me the proportions of a Barbie with all of the antiquated body modification—the dark, insidious context of a corset,” Nef says. Mr. Pearl made it happen. And while she never pulls the piece out for day-to-day wear (she’s quick to note how she almost fainted in it on the steps of the 2024 Met Gala), Nef says the piece remains in her fashion arsenal for the moments when it might feel right—for her, choice is everything. “You can wear a corset one day and a drop waist the next,” she says. (In fact, the corset renaissance comes just as some designers, including Matthieu Blazy at Chanel and Miuccia Prada at Miu Miu, are showing drop-waist looks utterly flowing and free.)
When I realize a trip to London isn’t in the cards—Mr. Pearl only takes on select clients for in-person fittings—I turn to Jackson Wiederhoeft, whose brand bears his last name and who makes bespoke corsets by hand in Manhattan’s Garment District. Inside his pink-and-emerald-green showroom, Wiederhoeft and a colleague begin by taking 19 measurements, including what they call my “smallest waist”—the tightest they can wrap a tape measure around the part of my waist where the corset will constrict me the most. After the measuring, I’m assigned a numerical size between 00 and 30 and then a subtype—curvy, athletic, petite, or flare. Soon I’m trying on a sample, and it’s the most comfortable corset I’ve ever worn. Unfortunately, it’s also three months’ rent, and so for now it will have to remain a dream.
As much as I’ve been loving squeezing my body into new corsets (or, at least, loving the results), there are times when the pain and inconvenience proves to be a bit much. Back in the bathroom at Ayat, I’m faced with a choice of my own, though it’s an easy one: I simply loosen my laces, open the buttons one by one, and drop my corset into my tote. Almost immediately, my body begins to feel a bit like crescent roll dough that’s popped out of its container. When I return to our table, I confess to just what I’d been up to. “So you’re finished with corsets?” my friend asks, with a sly smile.
Today? Definitely. Tomorrow? I’ll probably lace back up again.
