In Coralie Fargeat's body horror film "The Substance", currently nominated for five Academy Awards, the protagonist, Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), after turning 50 and on her way to being replaced in her job by a younger and more attractive woman, turns to a black-market glowing neon yellow concoction. This mysterious substance promises to deliver a better version of herself, and, indeed, it does.
Soon after injecting the liquid, a younger version of Elisabeth, whom she names Sue (Margaret Qualley), emerges from her back. A new life begins, but it comes at the cost of a grotesque physical and moral degradation. The film, which won Best Screenplay at last year's Cannes Film Festival, is a satirical sci-fi horror centered on society's obsession with female beauty and youth, the invisibility of aging women, and the exploitation of women's bodies in Hollywood's star system.
Elisabeth and Sue consume each other, transforming into deformed monsters. Their double monstrosity visually represents the cruel judgments women often face as they age and the societal derision at their changing bodies.
The substance itself symbolizes the extreme measures individuals take to meet certain beauty standards, driven by pressures from magazines, social media, or online commentary. From makeup and fillers to plastic surgery and weight loss treatments and drugs like Ozempic, these standards are pervasive.
Fashion contributes to the ongoing pursuit of a younger, more idealized self, becoming part of the horror that traps women.
However, there is nothing inherently horrific in Haute Couture, a world defined by its sublime, elegant, and refined style, materials and techniques. Still, the obsession with women's bodies surfaces within the industry and in Haute Couture as well.
Daniel Roseberry's Schiaparelli S/S 25 show at Paris Fashion Week exemplified this duality. His runway featured gowns crafted with the most refined techniques of Parisian ateliers, yet the designs also seemed to regress in terms of body ideals.
Corsets reigned supreme, cinching waists into an exaggerated S-shape. In some designs, the corsets were visible, while in others, they were discreet, offering structural support underneath the gowns. In most cases, Roseberry evoked an hourglass shape inspired by Schiaparelli's Shocking fragrance bottle, which was itself inspired by Mae West's curvy silhouette (View this photo).
Yet, where Mae West's curves were celebrated, Roseberry's corsets sculpted waistlines that mirrored the restrictive ideal of an Ozempic waist. Kendall Jenner wore for example a nude mesh dress with an embroidered satin bra and train that evoked the opulence of the late 1800s.
However, the dress was so tight that a roll of skin was visible spilling above the back of her corset, highlighting the extreme and unnecessary compression of her body, a detail that raises concerns about the pressure on "normal-sized" women to fit such standards.
The geometry of the corset was particularly striking when paired with a draped tulle skirt: in one design a corset formed a rigid, tutu-like peplum that juttingly arced from the models' body, creating wavy shapes.
Padded structures around the hips of some of the evening gowns didn't enhance a plump silhouette, but rather emphasized the sharpness of the hip bones, resembling structural concrete beams, a detail that pointed at architecture. Architectural and sculptural volumes were also present in jackets featuring low, rigid necklines and there was just one black design in which the waist wasn't emphasized (and, frankly, it just looked like a shapeless tent...).
The collection's color palette was dominated by dusty nudes, with pale grays and browns interspersed and splashes of black. Roseberry explained that the hues were inspired by a visit to an antique shop, where he found early-20th-century Lyons couture ribbons.
Some of the designs included in the show were created using silk ribbons sourced from that collection that formed vertical tiers or were twisted around the body to form layers. These multi-layered effects and some of the techniques employed in the collection evoked '50s styles by Jean Dessès and Roberto Capucci and the cream skirt of a gown with a black bodice called to mind some of the iconic silhouettes designed by Charles James.
Overall, the collection was more sculptural and rigid than conceptual, with some designs looking like more extravagant and elaborate derivations of the nude ensembles in Schiaparelli's A/W 23 collection. Though titled Icarus, a reference to the Greek myth about ambition and the risks of striving too high, the collection did not appear as a cautionary tale. Rather, it was conceived by the designer as a tribute to the power of Haute Couture, suggesting that the pursuit of beauty and innovation in fashion mirrors the ambition to transcend limits.
That said, the return of corsets and tiny waists makes you think: corsets aren't certainly a new addition in the history of contemporary fashion and re-emerged periodically over the last decades, often in punk-inspired contexts or to play with anachronisms and juxtapositions between different fashion eras, while medical corsets also inspired some trends.
Yet, the return of rigid, waist-cinching designs in this collection feels particularly ill-timed, coinciding with the resurgence of social and personal constraints imposed on women. At a time when women's rights are under threat in many parts of the world, these designs seem less like a celebration of couture and more like a reflection of restrictive beauty standards.
Fashion has never been about comfort, but in some Haute Couture collections, it now seems entirely absent, with gowns that prevent bending or sitting becoming the norm on the runway or on the red-carpet (behind-the-scenes footage of events often shows guests arriving standing in mini-vans to gala and awarding ceremonies, as if sitting is no longer an option).
The best approach, then, is to admire the craftsmanship behind these designs while remembering that we can feel like goddesses without constricting corsets and we can actually laugh at the absurdity of restrictive fashion perhaps through caricatures from the 1700s or 1800s in the Wellcome Collection.
Fashion students interested in the medical effects of corsetry can also explore from its archives historical documents on the deformation of ribcage and spine due to tight lacing or early innovations from the late 1800s aimed at improving corset design. In a nutshell, don't let yourself be constricted by fashion, but use its trendy constrictions as tools to educate yourself, expand your creativity and challenge the expectations and pressures it places on us.
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