Top A corset belt by Italian designer Mariella Burani is paired with dainty lace on the designer’s runway in Milan.
In this va-va-voom hourglass moment, the saggy peasant shirts and farm-girl floral babydolls of the past few springs should probably sit out the season in a heap on the floor of your closet, as you will need the space to hang up those trendier piped satin corsets, all boning and C-cups.
Not since Madonna poked out the eyes of the early nineties with Gaultier's conical cannons has fetish gear been so mainstream. Underwear is outerwear again and knickers and naughty bits are being flashed all over the runways.
I wonder if it has to do with dance culture. When the music gets overprocessed, the synthesizers carry on to our closets. Even the club kids are stepping up: Life is a costume party again.
But even if you have vowed to never cut a rug in public again, there are still larger fashion implications for you.
Jeans, pants, skirts, shorts: All must have a proper high rise emphasizing your waist-to-hip ratio (or faking a differential with trompe l'oeil trickery and extreme fashion measures, in my tomboyish case). Dresses cling to torsos to effect a figure 8. Corsetry boning, lacing and contour zipping are everywhere.
But if you just can't commit to zipping or hooking yourself like sausage into a confectionery casing, there are a few easy tricks to help you out, a big belt being the best way to make like a Varga girl. This shot from the Mariella Burani runway in Italy features many trends of the moment: white, mixed-up textures, lace - and a blockbuster cincher.
For another take, we went straight to our favourite belt expert, Brave, which features cinchers handmade in Toronto for incredibly reasonable prices. This white knockoff is called Callista and retails for $117 through www.braveleather.com. It is a lot more comfortable than it looks. Often, mincing devices have the effect of pushing your womanliness either up or down or both, creating bulges where there should be softly swelling hills.
This belt, however, is just the right width, so it doesn't carve into your rib cage or cut into your hips when you slouch. So you feel nothing but the sexy.