JUDITH WATT takes men’s corsets out of the closet and into the parade
IN her book Fabulous Nobodies, Lee Tulloch had her protagonist give all her dresses names and characters. Tulloch says it’s not just about trying on frocks, but about becoming them: “When people criticise fantasy clothes on the runway, I always defend it because dressing in fantasy clothes is therapeutic. Clothes allow us to try out identities, to become our fantasies. It’s a positive, not a negative thing”
Transformation – the act of becoming something else – has moved firmly from a fetish sub-culture into the fashion spotlight. In London, couturier Marco Matysik makes corsets for men and women and says that there, they’ve moved out of fetishism and historical costume and back into fashion. Last year Alexander McQueen sent corsets down the runway; this year it was Westwood with a range of corsets embroidered in rhinestones, made by South African-born Mr Pearl, who boasts a devastatingly narrow 35cm waist.
Pearl makes corsets for Lacroix, Dior and Mugler and is the doyen of the male corset, reforming his body into the extreme wasp shape favour-ed by the early 19th-century dan-dies. He wears a corset most days, concealed under his Saville Row suit and crisp cotton shirt. “It’s about individuality and extremity,” says 1,84m tall Matysik, who boasts a 50cm waist and just “ad-ores” wearing them. “A corset is very restrictive and that makes one feel vulnerable. It’s not just about men wanting to be women, it’s about discipline and vulnerability. It’s very arousing and completely wonderful, because one wants to be escorted and looked after.”
Increasingly, top – elitist – fashion is allowing us to become another version of ourselves. When a fetishist puts on high- heeled boots and a corset, he or she has a clearly delineated other identity. Designer/couturier Charles “Hercules” Fegen is probably the only designer in South Africa to both understand and practise this.
After four years working as a designer at The Boys, as his partner Norman Cullen’s right- and left-hand-man, Charles left to set up on his own. He was responsible for the shocking frock worn by Gillian van Houten on M-Net, and Doreen Morris wearing green and gold “armour” to emsee the Miss World competition at The Lost City.
Sounds conventional? Not when Charles gets going: his bias-cut velvet sheath dresses are an inspired mix of raw Nineties sexuality and Hollywood tradition. “The reality is that I make stunning stuff and gender doesn’t come into it.”
Everyone, from northern suburbs ladies and their daughters to drags, is queueing up at his door to have a Charles Hercules frock, gown or corset, having fittings surrounded by over 200 Barbie dolls. “For millions of years men have worshipped the female goddess. Barbie is the essence of the female,” says Charles.
So when Bob (not his real name) finally plucked up courage to ask for a corset after the fourth visit to the salon, he asked Charles if he could get “Ken into Barbie”. “He’ll never be Barbie,” snorts Charles, who agreed to help this transformation. “Making a corset is a fabulous thing to do. It moulds you from male into female.”
Bob is a straight man, one of four that come to Charles. He says he doesn’t wear a corset unless he is cross-dressing because of the discomfort: his waist is reduced by a massive 35cm, going from 80cm to 45cm. He usually laces up three days before a social event in which he’ll cross-dress. Over that period he’ll tighten the laces at the back by tying them to a door handle and pulling. A sexual turn on? “Yes and no. It can be very arousing.With a corset you can change your body shape drastically. My masculinity is switched off and I get in touch with my feminine side.”
Making Bob’s corset was a first for Charles. “I worked from a female prototype and adapted it to the male form. You can’t change the size of the hips, but you pad the bum area in proportion to the lift of the bust. You start boning at the centre front, work all the way around on each side and lace up at the back. Everything has to be in proportion. The momentum of the body during the day means that the flesh above and below the wasp waist shifts to give greater feminine effect and as the fibres warm with the temperature of the body relaxes and the fit becomes tighter.”
Suffering to be beautiful is often masochism. Betty Ryan, a Wimbledon tennis star before World War I, recalled that women’s dressing rooms in English tennis clubs provided a rail near the fireplace where the steel-boned corsets in which the women played could be dried: “It was never a pretty sight. Most of them were bloodstained.” Bob suffers from an ulcer, which makes wearing a corset painful and admits it might not be physically healthy.
But then much of the debate around corsets was – and is – puritanical. That men and women might enjoy the sensation is only now becoming acceptable. But check this comment from “Staylace”, writing in 1867 on the “so- called evils of tight-lacing to be a mere bugbear …” and rejoicing in “quite a collection of these much-abused objects and never feel prouder or happier than when I survey in myself the fascinating undulations of outline.”
Women’s corsets by the mid-19th-century were erotic because they enhanced sexuality. They were reputed to raise the temperature of the genitals and could be highly arousing if they were long enough for labial stimulation. Dickens is full of references to men in tight stays (the term for garments that constricted the waist).
The mood of international designer fashion has shifted from relaxed sportswear to highly mannered clothes that essentially wear you. “There is no way a frock with a corset and bustle is going to find its way onto the high street,” says Matysik, illustrating that fashion is about individuality and very real elitism again. “I love to wear my corsets under my suit, but wouldn’t do so in public because ordinary people might find it provocative,” he adds. “I’d cause gawkers’ gridlock by wearing my Charles Hercules corseted and bustled silk frock in public in the malls of Johannesburg.”
But isn’t that what real fashion is for?