After its debut in Vivienne Westwood's boutique on rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, Paris, the exhibition celebrating the history of her corsets is making its way to London.
Opening today at the label's boutique (44 Conduit Street and running until 21st May) to coincide with London Craft Week, the free event "Vivienne Westwood Corsets: 1987 to Present Day" is a celebration of the late British designer's signature piece. Borrowed from art and history and reinvented in a modern key, corsets constantly reappeared in Westwood's collections.
The selection of corsets includes also the first ones that appeared in Westwood's A/W 1987 show, and some stunning exceptional pieces, such as two corseted evening jackets, dubbed "The Martyr to Love" and "The Slave to Love".
The two designs were created in in collaboration with couture corset-maker Mr Pearl for the designer's first on-schedule menswear show, Vivienne Westwood MAN, Autumn-Winter 1996/97 collection.
Both the jackets are characterized by a silhouette that shows some derivation from corsets, but also points at Renaissance doublets.
The designs represent a male torso complete with bulging muscles, cleverly recreated using pearls and glass beads of different colours that perfectly mimic the human body. Besides, one corseted jacket features a slash on the chest and on the left arm from which ruby red beads drip recreating surreal wounds, while another features on the back red glass beads symbolising the marks left by whipping.
The attention to detail is exceptional, with each sinew and curve meticulously rendered to create a stunning and hyper-realistic effect.
Designed to make a bold impression and leave a lasting impact, the two jackets manipulated the human form and pushed the boundaries of fashion and human anatomy, creating a perception of a desired shape or silhouette that wasn't necessarily the wearer's natural physique. Punk, dramatic and maybe hinting at opera costumes as well with a healthy dose of fetishism mixed in, the powerful and alluring jackets remain fascinating pieces in the history of fashion.
Yet employing different techniques to recreate the illusion of the human body on clothing has always been popular in fashion. Most times, rather than creating a realistic portrayal of the human body, these techniques were employed to challenge societal norms and expectations.
Westwood / Mr Pearl used beads for their designs, but Gaultier opted for prints for his famous body-illusion graphics from his S/S 1996 "Cyberbaba" collection. The latter incorporated chiseled torso prints on shirts, long-sleeve tops, jackets and bombers.
Gaultier often used these trompe l’oeil patterns to highlight the eroticism of the human physique, allowing the wearers to play with fashion and with their sexuality in a surreal and ironic way.
A favorite with celebrities and TikTokers alike, the vintage pieces from that early collection became so iconic that last year Y/Project's Glenn Martens, in collaboration with Jean Paul Gaultier, reinvented the optical illusion body prints for his brand's A/W 22 collection.
Ripped abs shirts and jackets returned, this time accompanied by penis pants (the body of Spanish model and content creator Javier des Leon was used for the male body prints), and by prints of breasts and of a female body replicated on tops or evening dresses.
In this new incarnation the body illusions seem to have a new function - fooling social media like Instagram. Post a photo of yourself naked and it will be likely taken down; post an image of yourself clad in these body-morphing designs and you may instead avoid the ire of Instagram's censorship system.
In the '90s the trompe l’oeil torso was a trend, as proved also by a Robert Downey Jr picture by Davis Factor in which the actor wears a simple shirt complete with bulging six-pack abs (the photograph is currently available on Sotheby's site), but there were also more sophisticated and arty versions of this trend.
In Issey Miyake's Pleats Please Guest Artist Series, the designer included a series of one-size-fits all, permanently pleated polyester garments made with different artists.
The designs in collaboration with contemporary Japanese photographer Yasumasa Morimura incorporated a collage by Morimura of the artist wearing red mesh and a nude female figure from Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres' 1856 neoclassical painting "La Source".
The design was conceived as a three-way collaboration: Miyake created the foundation, Morimura the design and the wearer offered the body to animate the print and impersonate the collage, turning in this case into a statuesque nude figure.
While this body illusion trend had already emerged in the 1980s with the introduction of bodybuilding-inspired clothing, at the end of the '70s there were already some experiments along these lines.
For instance, Italian artist and designer Cinzia Ruggeri created costumes for theatrical pieces such as "Schönberg Kabarett" (1979). In this performance there were several male characters, but all of them were played by women. Ruggeri eliminated the problem of creating for all of them complex male wardrobes, but streamlined the designs and reduced them to simple padded jackets on which she replicated a trompe l’oeil sketch of a finely detailed suit or an entire torso with bulging muscles (the pictures do not make justice to the designs, but this is what happens when curators of fashion exhibitions use the garments as decorative pieces to create a set rather than employing them as the protagonists of the event, allowing visitors in this way to actually admire and study what's on display…).
While the former marked the return of the trompe l'oeil trend in fashion, the latter pre-dates Westwood's doublet-like corseted torso jackets. What's striking in these more simple pieces is the fact that the musculature of the human form and the details of the suit were hand-painted on the fabric. This simplicity and the fact that the jackets came in a light material allowed the actors to move freely on stage, effortlessly capturing the essence of the characters they were impersonating.
In conclusion, the trend of creating body illusions by referencing the human body on a fashion design, has a long history and it is a reflection of our fascination with the human form. Expect to see in future new techniques and innovations in fashion to create further intriguing interpretations of the human anatomy.
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