She fainted and fell off her chair
Hey, here’s an idea, let’s put women back into corsets. People who can’t breathe properly can’t rebel.
Kim Kardashian West is perched on a chair. She’s not quite sitting; instead, she’s pushing her hands into the armrests then leaning against the cushion. Her figure is grotesque: above her generous hips rests an already small waist, tightened beyond belief thanks to a flesh-coloured corset. She addresses the camera. “Anna, if I don’t sit down for dinner, now you know why. I’ll be walking around mingling, talking, but I can hardly sit …” – she tries to sit, she can’t – “I can only half-sit.”
…Perhaps she was right not to sit; a few weeks later, actor Elle Fanning attended a dinner at Cannes where she fainted and fell off her chair. Her dress, a vintage Prada gown with a corseted waist, was too tight.
Breathing is for men.
Earlier this month Kylie Jenner posted a picture of her nails on Instagram. They were tie-dye, presumably acrylics, and absurdly long. How long is absurdly long? There aren’t universal rules about this of course, but if your nail goes on for around an inch after your finger ends, it seems fair to assume that your ability to go about your day normally will be limited.
Are they all drugged in that family, or what?
Like Victorian aristocrats, women who wear corsets and long acrylics are flaunting the fact that their lives and status do not depend on labour, either physical or requiring long hours. Like Victorian aristocrats, they frequently discuss the sheer amount of time and energy they spend on physical appearance, thus making it clear that their reliance on labour has been substituted with the need to look absolutely flawless. Labour is no longer necessary to them because beauty is their work; their beauty is understood to be enough, because to them it is labour.
But is it even beauty? Not to me it’s not. I’ll take Reese Witherspoon grubby and sweaty in Wild over a Kardashian in a corset any day.
I started reading a book once about what was wrong with modern civilization. Before I had finished the first chapter, the writer (a woman) was bemoaning the fact that women didn’t wear corsets anymore. I never made it past the first chapter.
I own a corset, but only because it’s impossible to buy a medical back brace that is designed for women – the medical ones all, without exception, are designed to go straight around the chest; no accounting for breasts. I don’t want to wear a binder (which is what standard back braces effectively become), so I bought a corset. That way I can get a support designed for women. I wear it just snug enough to give my back the support it occasionally needs; sometimes I’m in too much pain to sit up without support, and can’t (for whatever reason) excuse myself and lie down. I’m not one for taking too much notice of convention, but even I won’t lie down on the floor of a church during a wedding or funeral.
That’s different though. Using a corset as a medical device is one thing, and using it the way Kim Kardashian is described as using it is quite another.
Hell, even wearing corsets occasionally for certain kinds of aesthetic effects or recreation is something different from their reintroduction as mandatory for basic presentation.
Well, Kardashian is doing the first rather than the second, I think, but I still look askance. You don’t see men distorting bits of their bodies occasionally for certain kinds of aesthetic effects or recreation.