In a Cinch: Can Corsets Ever Be Modern?

Reported by Vogue.

The corset is back — and this time, it's not hiding under a ball gown. According to Vogue, Kylie Jenner's stylists, sisters Alexandra and Mackenzie Grandquist, have quietly confirmed what the fashion-forward have already started doing: wearing corsets under a T-shirt to grab lunch. Jenner herself owns a bespoke Mr. Pearl creation (a year in the making, fitted across multiple sessions in his London atelier) plus a rotation of Jean Paul Gaultier waspies. She's not alone. Hailey Bieber cinched up for a recent girls' night. Sabrina Carpenter bedazzled her way through an entire tour in corseted looks. Bad Bunny rewrote Grammy fashion history in a custom Schiaparelli hourglass tuxedo. The silhouette isn't making a comeback — it never actually left.

The Most Controversial Garment in History Gets a Reframe

Valerie Steele, chief curator at FIT's museum and author of The Corset: A Cultural History, once called it "probably the most controversial garment in the history of fashion." Her read in 2025? The corset didn't disappear — women simply moved the constriction inward. "Women didn't stop wearing corsets," Steele says. "They just internalized them in the form of diet, exercise, liposuction, tummy tucks, and, recently, Ozempic." Stripped of its punitive history, the modern corset carries an entirely different charge. Steele points to Matières Fécales — the label founded by Hannah Rose Dalton and Steven Raj Bhaskaran — whose Paris Fashion Week show featured over 15 hourglass silhouettes across a genuinely diverse range of bodies as a turning point. The message, per Steele: "I'm powerful, I'm sexy."

The retail reality backs this up. At Manhattan's Orchard Corset on the Lower East Side, owners Peggy and Ralph Bergstein are fielding demand for classic hook-and-eye styles, while contemporary versions have evolved: front closures (a practical gift for anyone who lives alone), construction-grade steel boning replacing the flimsy celluloid of midcentury versions, and custom fittings that start with 19 measurements. Designer Jackson Wiederhoeft builds bespoke pieces by hand in the Garment District — sized on a scale from 00 to 30, with subtypes including curvy, athletic, and flare. The result is reportedly the most comfortable corset you'll ever wear. The price tag, however, runs about three months' rent. Illisa, the vintage lingerie dealer whose Sutton Place boutique once counted Gaultier and Azzedine Alaïa as clients, notes that every prestige period drama — Bridgerton, the forthcoming Wuthering Heights — sends business through the roof.

Actor and model Hari Nef offers perhaps the most honest articulation of what the corset means right now. After being introduced to waist cinchers on the Barbie set by costume director Jacqueline Durran, Nef commissioned a Mr. Pearl corset for the film's press tour — one that deliberately invoked, in her words, "the antiquated body modification, the dark, insidious context" of the garment. She nearly fainted in it on the 2024 Met Gala steps. She keeps it anyway, for the moments it feels right. "You can wear a corset one day and a drop waist the next," she says — a reminder that the corset's power in 2025 is almost entirely contingent on the word choice.

The corset's modern appeal isn't about suffering for beauty — it's about knowing exactly what you're signing up for, and deciding it's worth it anyway.

Read the original at Vogue.