If you've ever had problems with your back, you fractured a vertebrae or were operated in your abdomen, you may be familiar with corsets and binders that, closing with a large Velcro strap, are designed to guarantee support and compression following a series of traumas and operations, including abdominal plastic surgery, tummy tuck, hernia surgery or abdomen liposuction. While they are usually worn underneath ordinary clothes, it is also possible to wear them on top of another garment.
Dolce & Gabbana seemed to reference orthopaedic girdles in their men's A/W 23 collection, but, in the women's collection, showcased yesterday during Milan Fashion Week, the orthopaedic or post-operative thread continued with a black Velcro bustier (a reference to abdominal plastic surgery or tummy tuck, maybe?) matched with a black leather jacket and with a long sheer dress. The bustier, that also featured the logo of the design duo, seemed inspired by orthopaedic corsets and also featured double Velcro straps.
Those of us who had some experience in wearing orthopaedic corsets will immediately link this design to their binders; others lucky enough to have avoided an operation or a trauma of some kind, will instead spot in it a practical corset that can be strapped with Velcro. Yet it doesn't really matter what you'll see in this design, because it is probably more important to move from this connection and explore further the orthopaedic or medical theme.
It would be interesting if fashion designers would have enough time to experiment in other fields as well, maybe collaborating with doctors to develop innovative medical accessories and garments.
Nobody needs a branded post-operative corset, but there are some devices that could become more comfortable and maybe more invisible or more fun if reimagined by a designer – imagine colourful compression tights or more comfortable post-operative vascular surgery monocollants that would improve a patient's self-esteem.
Collaboration is the norm nowadays, but it is usually done between brands, it would instead be more intriguing to develop designs with scientists and doctors, or even with institutions like the Wellcome Collection in London.
If you're a fashion designer, you will make fascinating, exciting and curious discoveries in its archives, getting the chance to be inspired by texts, images and objects from the medical practice and beyond.
The collection also includes quite a few orthopaedic accessories: one of the earliest is an orthopaedic corset made of perforated iron, secured by shoulder straps and featuring hinges at both sides and locks at the front. Fitting an adult male (from 1601-1800 ) the corset was designed to correct skeletal abnormalities.
In the collection there are also orthopaedic iron corsets from the 1800s for children, built almost like a cage that enclosed the chest and the back and worn to support the spine and gradually improve posture.
Dolce & Gabbana's A/W 23 collection features also a shiny corset with two locks on the front (this is not the first time the duo includes such a design in a collection) that finds correspondences in other pieces at the Wellcome Collection, in particular a brass corset used to minimise the waist or as an orthopaedic device to support the back, and another brass corset from the 1800s with holes drilled into the sides to lighten the weight and provide ventilation. This corset supported the back or corrected a spinal deformity such as scoliosis (while minimising the waist).
Until the 1870s and 1880s both men and women regularly wore corsets. Army officers even wore them with tightly tailored uniforms to emphasise their straight backs and rigid discipline and the Wellcome Collection archive also features a variety of caricatures about corsets (in one of them a dandy is being fit into a corset by a young Black man and a hairdresser) and photographs like the one of Con Oram lacing A.P. Holland in drag into a boned corset in a show for the Bow Bells concert party.
As you can see, a medical inspiration can lead us to a multi-layered research with some utterly unexpected but very stimulating results, so always think laterally and find inspirations in unusual places, especially in fields you may not be familiar with.
For those of you who are temporarily orthopaedically impaired and are currently wearing a post-operative Velcro corset, endure the discomfort and, once you've finished wearing it, don't throw it out, but disassemble it and reinvent it a bit adding lacing details, tulle and, why not, even some gems and crystals. Come next season you'll be trendier than the models on D&G's runway.