LEARNING CURVE

In the age of plastic surgery and GLP-1s, why are corsets more popular than ever? Margaux Anbouba goes in for the squeeze.

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LESS IS MORE The corseted tuxedo that Bad Bunny wore at the 2026 Grammys was based on this look from Schiaparelli's 2023 couture runway.

I'm well into a meze spread at Ayat, a favorite Palestinian restaurant in Manhattan's East Village, when I get a stitch in my side. The pressure building and building, I look at my friend and sigh: “I'll be right back,” I say, before racing to the bathroom for an emergency adjustment to the corset I’m wearing.

A few weeks before, I had been talking to Kylie Jenner's stylists, sisters Alexandra and Mackenzie Grandquist, about fash- ion’s rediscovered obsession with the waist when they clued me in on a little secret.

Corsets are under more outfits than you would believe, Mackenzie said, adding they are no longer just used to shape figures for high-stakes events. “You can just throw one on with a T-shirt to go out to lunch.”

Jenner's own collection, they tell me, includes a bespoke creation by couture-corset legend Mr. Pearl (which took a year and multiple fittings in his London atelier to perfect) and a handful of Jean Paul Gaultier waspies (waist-only versions of the garment). She’s in shapely company: Hailey Bieber wore her own take on the corset for a recent girls night out, Sabrina Carpenter wore a variety of bedazzled full-body versions throughout her Short n’ Sweet tour, Jessie Buckley turned to a torso-size waspie while promoting The Bride!, and Bad Bunny made history at the Grammys in an hourglass-fitted custom Schiaparelli corseted tuxedo.

Valerie Steele, chief curator of The Museum at Manhat- tan’s Fashion Institute of Technology, called the corset— long derided as anti-feminist and imprisoning—“probably the most controversial garment in the history of fashion” in her 2001 book