#tightlacing

1. Tightlacing is good, actually. Corsets, simply look best when there's visible shaping and contrasting going on. And to quote the ancients, no, it shouldn't hurt, and yes, you can breathe.

2. The best use of corsetry on screen is in the 1955 Gina Lollobrigida film La donna più bella del mondo (Beatiful but Dangerous, for English-speaking audiences). The second best use is in La Viaccia (The Lovemakers) the 1961 Claudia Cardinale film. Tragically, the one movie I know of that actually features a corset enthusiast, 1951's Two Weeks with Love, is absolute trash. I'd say I'm hankering for remake that is actually good, but Dirty Dancing already exists.

3. A large part of my brain wiring regarding corsets is due to Pinky and the Brain #3 (DC Comics, 1996), where Brain's attempts to romance Henry VIII are undone by his failure to heed Pinky's repeated warnings about his (Brain's) too-tight corset gave a name to a thing I was already becoming obsessed with.

4. Done properly, corset-lacing scenes are one of my very favorite things in the world. Unfortunately, very few shown on film or TV are satisfying, and the often hackneyed messaging is only sometimes the problem. The bigger reason, is actually that corset lacing, done properly, is simply not very screen-friendly. It takes too long. It's a continuity nightmare. The actual corset lacing is very rarely actually the point of a scene, and shouldn't be. Ultimately, it's more practical to fake the process my just miming the expected movements without doing any actual tightening; even if it looks wrong, who's going to care?

(Me.)

5. I am exceedingly ambivalent about the last few years' return of corsets to ubiquity in the fashion world, because it feels quite impossible to separate their current popularity from the latest push for extreme thinness as an ideal. This has always been true, I suppose, but now more than during the decades when corsetry had receded into being a niche thing.

6. I do not care at all about front-laced corsets as a character design element (glares at BanG Dream! Ave Mujica). Yes, the laces are the most iconic visual element in a corset's design, and so it's tempting to place it where they're most visible. Still don't like it, especially since it's also quite often used with designs where the corset isn't doing any actual cinching. You're too damn thin, anime waifus!

7. I really quite miss the Staylace.com site. While I can totally understand why the larger corset community moved away from it as soon as it had the chance--it was not a place that cared about women except as objects, and its politics were absolutely rancid--its comprehensiveness (of a sort), regularity, and resistance to change, all the way to 2022, made it feel very stable even when the rest of the internet wasn't, and made it feel increasingly like archeology. It outlasted a lot of the internet, and that's not nothing.

Plus, I really like some of the less abuse-laden fiction.