Fab Read: The Black Dress

FabSugar — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 16:00:22 PST

We all know that black dresses are hardly just reserved for funerals anymore - they're wardrobe staples! In The Black Dress ($15), Dr. Valerie Steele, Director and Chief Curator of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology (my alma mater!), explores the zeitgeist of the black dress and how they've become timelessly chic.

The tome is filled with pages of iconic black dress images pulled from Chanel's collection, Audrey Hepburn's films, and more, plus quotes on the color black from writers, artists, and fashion personalities. Definitely one to check out - especially if you love your LBDs as much as I do.

Corsets: Lots of Controversy Squeezed Into One Undergarment

Tara Block — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 14:40:11 PST

Nowadays, women who want a trimmer waist in a pinch typically turn to Spanx or some other body-slimming underwear. But when it's less about practicality and more about looking sexy in nothing but your skivvies (like for your Valentine's Day date night, for instance), you may choose to don a corset. While modern women are free to wear these fitted underpinnings whenever we want to spice things up in the bedroom, corsets and the idealized tiny waists they create have a long and controversial history that doesn't seem to be going away any time soon.

Just last September, Vogue Italia controversially featured Ethel Granger and her 13-inch waist, which she achieved by wearing a corset 24-7. Ethel, who holds the record for the smallest waist in recorded history, went through the painful process for her husband. Her motivation brings up one of the main issues with corsets: are they for the men or the women? And Romanian-born model Ioana Spangenberg, "the human hourglass," is being criticized for setting a bad example with her 20-inch waist, even though she claims she can't help her shape and didn't use corsets to achieve it.

To find out more about what made corsets so controversial back in their heyday (including info from Valerie Steele's book The Corset: A Cultural History), let's look back at some of the vintage ads and photos of these constrictive undergarments and the nonhuman-like shapes they created on women.