How wearing a corset undid years of hating my body – and helped get my confidence back after divorce
- Sarah Vine admits that as a teenage and young adult she felt pressured to starve herself to achieve the desired slim-frame that looked good in anything
- The UK-based writer, 55, has decided to give wearing a corset a go and loves it
- She says that the more she wears it the more she feels confident in herself
- Read more: Sarah Vine for The Mail On Sunday
Corsets. They are having a moment. More than a moment, in fact: they have been on the fashion radar for a good couple of years now, which in style terms is the equivalent of aeons. From the catwalks of Milan to the market stalls of Camden, you can barely breathe (quite literally) for the things.
Still, as a 55-year-old mum, I can’t quite escape my conditioning. For me, they will always be redolent of the slightly tawdry fantasies of middleaged salarymen. That, or they make me think of stern-bosomed, tight-laced matriarchs in Ealing comedies, and Queen Victoria. Neither impression is especially appealing.
So why, I hear you ask, do I find myself wearing one in the pages of a national newspaper?
I am neither young nor, let’s face it, Madonna, who, if her Instagram is anything to go by, still has a whole collection of the things. Then again, she did ‘break the internet’ long before the internet even existed for most of us, in that famous Jean Paul Gaultier conical bra corset, custom-made for her Blonde Ambition tour in 1990.
![Sarah Vine, 55, (pictured) has decided to give wearing a corset a go and loves it. She says that the more she wears it the more she feels confident in herself](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2022/12/14/21/65591799-11538609-image-a-99_1671051797766.jpg)
Sarah Vine, 55, (pictured) has decided to give wearing a corset a go and loves it. She says that the more she wears it the more she feels confident in herself
Still, mumsy old middle-aged me, whose wardrobe is full of Marks & Spencer staples and whose idea of high fashion is a pair of Me+Em trousers (no offence to Me+Em, but you know what I mean)? Absurd.
And yet, as you can see, here I am, trussed up like a proper old bird just in time for Christmas in a custom-made number from Rigby & Peller.
It all started when normally body-shy Gen Z songstress and global superstar Billie Eilish slightly took the world by surprise by posing for the front cover of Vogue in a bespoke pink silk Burberry version — a tattooed pop goddess emerging from her sports luxe chrysalis. That, believe it or not, was back in June 2021.
Wouldn’t it be fun (her words), my editor said to me, if I too embraced the trend?
‘Er, no,’ I replied.
She persisted. It would be ‘empowering’. It would do me good, boost my confidence. She couldn’t get me Burberry, but Rigby & Peller, one-time official ‘corsetiere’ to our late Queen, had agreed to make me my own special corset. Eventually, after much buttering up and entirely against my better judgment, I gave in. What can I say? She’s a very persuasive woman.
Almost immediately, I regretted it. For someone who is not shy about expressing her feelings in words, when it comes to my physical self I am a bit of an introvert. It took weeks — months, in fact — before they could pin me down for my first fitting. Even the idea of being measured for the damn thing filled me with anxiety. It felt like a test that I was almost certainly destined to fail.
![Sarah Vine gets made to measure shapewear at Rigby and Peller. She decided to give it ago after her editor suggested it](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2022/12/14/21/65591793-11538609-Sarah_Vine_gets_made_to_measure_shapewear_at_Rigby_and_Peller_-a-102_1671051890074.jpg)
Sarah Vine gets made to measure shapewear at Rigby and Peller. She decided to give it ago after her editor suggested it
I am not someone who is especially connected or comfortable in her body. I can’t remember the last time I caught sight of myself in the mirror (I try not to look too often) or the last time I felt even remotely OK about my shape, let alone good. I have spent half my life at war with my physical self. It’s not just about the fat: I feel my shoulders are too broad, my neck too short, my arms too long, my hands too big, my calves too thick. I’m just — well, an unfortunate shape, something I was often reminded of in my youth. As a result, I have never really seen myself as attractive and always struggled with the idea that someone else might.
If that sounds over-the-top, I once spoke to a therapist about all this and she did suggest that I might perhaps have some mild form of body dysmorphia. Maybe. I’m not much of a one for labels or excuses but I did grow up at a time when thinness was considered a highly prized virtue, a notion reinforced by my environment.
I felt enormous pressure as a teenager and young adult to starve my robust frame into the ‘ideal’ female body shape: slim and petite, the kind that looked good in a silk-satin slip dress with spaghetti straps. I never succeeded. I still looked as if I ate a lot of spaghetti, and all that dieting just made my hair fall out and messed up my metabolism.
Anyway, the long and the short of it is that, to my mind, I am the antithesis of everything considered traditionally desirable in female form. And because I am not, sadly, one of those confident self-love millennial types who proudly embrace their differences — like plus-sized songstress Lizzo, who wore a black corset by Thom Browne to the Met Gala earlier this year —I’ve settled into a lifetime of low-level selfloathing and wearing a lot of black to blur the edges.
Fair to say, then, that this assignment was not exactly top of my wishlist. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more it felt as if I was embarking on some extreme form of exposure therapy, like an arachnophobe who is forced to hold a spider, or a person terrified of deep water diving off the side of a boat.
Of all the many demons that live in my head, the body-image demon is by far the nastiest — and here I was, about to poke the blighter straight in the eye.
Plus, there was other stuff going on in my life. Two months after reluctantly agreeing to, then repeatedly avoiding, this idea, my life imploded very publicly. My marriage ended, and the idea of exposing myself on any level, let alone in a corset, became not just a challenge but a mental impossibility.
It wasn’t only that I didn’t want to be one of those ghastly cliches — the desperate divorcee, the attentionseeking singleton; I didn’t have the emotional bandwidth to tie my shoelaces, let alone prance around in my underwear in front of a camera.
So, 18 months on and the question now is: am I finally ready? Might my corset, which has languished for so long in its pink tissue paper, unloved and unworn, lead me to some form of catharsis?
![It all started when normally body-shy Gen Z songstress and global superstar Billie Eilish slightly took the world by surprise by posing for the front cover of Vogue in a bespoke pink silk Burberry corset](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2022/12/14/21/65591795-11538609-image-a-103_1671051914227.jpg)
It all started when normally body-shy Gen Z songstress and global superstar Billie Eilish slightly took the world by surprise by posing for the front cover of Vogue in a bespoke pink silk Burberry corset
The simple and surprising answer is, yes. Absolutely 100 per cent yes. In fact, it has been a revelation. Put it this way: if I could feel the way this corset makes me feel every day of my life, I’d be a happy woman.
And that’s the great irony of it. How can a garment so binding, so tight in its limitations, so bound up in female oppression, somehow free me from all that body-image anxiety and make me, for the first time in longer than I care to remember, actually feel vaguely OK about myself?
The simple truth, of course, is that it gives me the body I lack. When I’m wearing it, I finally have something approximating the shape I have always desired. And this alters not only my outward appearance but also my mental attitude.
It reminds me of when I finally decided to confront my hair loss, almost a decade ago now. Getting a hairpiece to cover up my alopecia made me feel so much less exposed, so much safer, so much less vulnerable and insecure.
Wearing this thing has a similar effect: it makes me feel really confident. I don’t mind, for once, that people might notice me. And, as embarrassed as I am about such vanity, that is quite a pleasing feeling. Since my break-up, I spend most of my time either buried in work or catering to the diverse needs of my beloved offspring. The past few years have been emotionally tricky, and I have tended to cope by parcelling up my own feelings and setting them to one side.
This feels like a tiny bit of a liberation, a chance to focus on myself again. I am still wary of the desperate divorcee cliche, of course, and perhaps even more so because I’m conscious that, inevitably, doing this will attract the usual derision on social media. But I now definitely understand the appeal.
It’s not just the aesthetics of the thing — the way it enhances and shapes — but also the way it connects the wearer to her physicality in a way I hadn’t realised.
I won’t say I feel sexy, because logic tells me that’s obviously ridiculous (also my children would be utterly horrified) but it does feel like a fun way of expressing — maybe even reclaiming — my femininity, which I have buried for so long underneath the mantle of mother.
It’s also a way of flipping something traditionally considered by feminists to be an object of patriarchal oppression on its head — and owning it on my terms.
Corsets are confusing in the way they restrict the female form, yet at the same time enhance its sexuality. This makes them subconsciously very alluring but it’s also why, traditionally, they have been viewed as symbols of male oppression and why, in the past, women rejected them as an expression of their own emancipation.
But times have changed. In this post #MeToo age, young girls are increasingly defiant, unapologetic about their sexuality. They dress however they like and expect people to respect their boundaries regardless of appearance — and that is quite a radical shift.
The revival of the corset among young women is the perfect expression of that new defiance. And while some might see this as exhibitionist, I rather admire it. Envy it, even.
Most women of my generation wouldn’t have worn a corset beyond their private space because it would have been considered too overtly sexual. We felt we had to dress and behave in a certain way or suffer the consequences. That doesn’t seem to apply to my daughter’s generation. Why shouldn’t they adopt the aesthetic of the Folies Bergère and make it their own? Enjoy their youth and beauty in a way that we, cloaked in our anxieties, never did?
Of course, one has to be mindful of the mutton-dressedas-lamb issue. North of a certain age you probably don’t want to be too boudoir about the whole thing. No fishnets or feathers — and no Ann Summers-style reds or satins. Not for me, at any rate.
That’s one of the things I like so much about this Rigby & Peller number: as it’s bespoke, and I could choose the fabric (quite an exciting process — you get to rummage around in the basement of an 83-year-old company favoured by Royalty), it’s quite low-key.
There’s a touch of embellishment, but it’s designed more to subtly enhance than to show off. The black lace forms an optical illusion around the waist/ stomach area, which is most welcome. And the cups are shaped to contain the bust rather than display it. Nothing worse than slightly crepey bosoms being displayed like over-ripe pears on a plate.
My only criticism is that it doesn’t address the problem of post-menopausal overspill. It looks pretty good from the front; but the wires dig into the soft flesh of my underarms, which is not only uncomfortable but very unflattering. There is simply no way, were I ever to wear this out, that I could take my jacket off — although it would be fine under a shirt. That said, I haven’t worn a sleeveless top for years, so that’s not a huge handicap.
It’s also quite hard to sit down in, for the simple reason that whenever I do, the stays ride up and stab me in the armpit. But perhaps I’m just being fussy. Or a wuss. Or both.
The main thing, I discover, as I try it on with various outfits, is that you have to dress it down. Madonna was right all those years ago when she paired her Gaultier one with a pinstripe trouser suit.
If you want to avoid looking like an extra from Bridgerton or a suburban dominatrix, tailoring is about the only option that works. Mannish, wide trousers and a natty jacket are the perfect foil for the coquettish femininity of the corset. One feels feminine yet also confident — and maybe just a tiny bit powerful. I could get used to this.
- Sarah’s bespoke corset was hand-made to measure by Rigby & Peller Knightsbridge, costing £865. To book an appointment, please call 0207 225 4760, email bespoke@ rigbyandpeller.com or visit www.rigbyandpeller.com
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