“Just hold on and suck in!” » (“Hold on and don’t breathe!”), Mammy tells Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the wind. One clings to one of the posts of her four-poster bed, the other laces her corset, tightening the bonds so tightly that one almost feels pain for Vivien Leigh. Difficult to approach the bustier without talking about its ancestor who, for centuries, modeled silhouettes, helping to make the female body an assemblage “each part of which can be subject to the whim of fashion, to the desire to correct nature according to variable aesthetic canons”, we read in the pages of the Encyclopaedia Universalis.
Whalebone
Worn over a shirt, it was generally made of thick fabric, consolidated by a strong internal frame of wood, metal or whalebone. In the 19th centurye century, “its coercive and orthopedic aspect makes it the favorite subject of hygienists […] agreeing that women and children, being weak creatures by nature, need a guardian,” writes fashion historian Valerie Steele in a book she devotes to the subject – The Corset: A Cultural History (Yale University Press, 2001, untranslated) – and where she asks this question in particular: by disappearing materially, would the corset not have simply been internalized by women, replaced by diets, exercise or plastic surgery ?
At the beginning of the 20the century, couturiers Paul Poiret and Madeleine Vionnet freed women from corsets. And two decades later, Marcel Rochas created the strapless dress and the corset, exacerbating a certain idea of femininity. Let’s move on to this last one, a piece of lingerie that dresses Anouk Aimée so well in Lola, by Jacques Demy, or Anna Karina in the film by Jean-Luc Godard A woman is a woman, to focus on the bustier as “above » and as an evening dress.
It is here that parades an irresistible line-up of femme fatales who, at the very top of the sex appeal scale, have showcased their sensuality in dancer-singer-trainer numbers. Free shoulders, liberated women: Rita Hayworth in a black satin dress in Gilda, Marilyn Monroe in pink sheath in Men prefer blondes and even Jessica Rabbit in Who wants Roger Rabbit’s skin? We could also add Anita Ekberg, dancing the cha-cha-cha in The good life, by Federico Fellini, before going to cool off under the Trevi Fountain.
A symbol of performed femininity, the bustier has since the 1960s been digested, diverted, with repeated nods to its ancestor, the corset: in 1970 with Vivienne Westwood, then, in the 1980s, with Thierry Mugler and especially Jean Paul Gaultier, who made the revisited corset-bustier a trademark.
Exuberant or minimalist: during the following decade, the bustier also became more discreet with the tube top or tube dress, strapless tops with a straight neckline like the little black Versace uniform dress of Victoria Beckham during the Spice Girls period. If it loses its curves and its shaping effect, it retains a certain erotic charge. From sheath dress to office wear, the bustier is moving away from cabaret to perhaps soon become an element of formal costume, to be mixed with strappy tops, sweaters or shirts. This is strangely reminiscent of the corset. But the watchword today would rather be: “Hold on and breathe.” »
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