The Corset Controversy.

TAKE A DEEP BREATH, SCARLETT. THEN TAKE a hike. That famous, 17-inch corseted waist is a deception—and not just because Scarlett O'Hara was fictional. According to cultural historian Valerie Steele '78, Victorian women weren't as strait-laced as they claimed.

Steele, who teaches at the Fashion Institute of Technology and has written four books about the history and meaning of fashion, was at the Hood Museum of Art's summer exhibition of "Crinolines, Bustles, and Tight-lacing" to put the squeeze on what she calls "the corset controversy."

According to Steele, the nineteenth century was abuzz with claims of achieving minuscule waists. Doctors and dress reformers, on the other hand, warned that rightly laced corsets caused a range of ailments from consumption to cancer. Not only were corsets worn more . loosely than many people claimed, says Steele, but the contraptions could not be blamed for conditions more serious than fainting. The Victorian fascination with corsets, she contends, reflected anxieties about female sexuality and power, along with as trong dose of fetishism.

Steele debunks the twentieth-century theory that corsets kept women reigned-in politically. "Victorian women were not oppressed by tight-lacing, though they were oppressed," she said. Nor does the current Corset comeback represent an anti-feminist backlash. The kind of corset Madonna sports is just the latest chapter of the in-your-face manners, sexual and otherwise, sparked by convention-flouting punks in the , sixties and seventies. "High fashion has sucked up street fashion," Steele says.

Steele, who is turning her attention to researching the centuries-long appeal of the laced-uplook, predicts that corsets and the controversies surrounding them— will continue as long as people perceive the feinale body as a site of power.