Women's fashion is a wild time to be a historical costume nerd atm
Like, everything old is new, yadda yadda. But 'old-ass Elizabethan corsets/stays as crop-tops' was not even remotely on my 2020s bingo card
That sounds like an interesting sort of thing. (wanders off to google, even though it will be broken)
@JuliaRez I too am struggling to find photos of the corset tops I mean, because Google is a hive of bad AI photo-edits now.
Hm. When I were a wee gothic, good corsets came from Vollers or Axfords, and they were the same basic designs they'd been making for a century.
Which was not a bad thing because quality materials and craft meant they put up with a deal of drunken malarkey.
Now there's been some weird Cambrian explosion and camo pattern corsets with molle straps are things, and, modulo the grim industrial capitalism inherent, I am fascinated.
@JuliaRez Yeah, Victorian corset designs are ace
The one that my current goto pattern evolved from is like, 1895 iirc. Once I got it fitted to my bodyshape it's very comfortable.
To be clear I don't think these corset tops I'm seeing around are meant to be structural at all, it's entirely a decorative/aesthetic thing, I think.
@JuliaRez Like, if you make the neckline just a touch more modern and get rid of the flaps, you can very easily see a line from both of these sorts of shapes (cut-out bottom hem & more curved dip at the front) to contemporary corset tops.
There are corset tops shaped like modern/modern-ish corsets too, but these are the ones that make me go "Oooh, I thought you were extinct, hi!"
(Now I want a Coelocanth Corset)
https://reconstructinghistory.com/cdn/shop/products/RH203frontcover.jpg?v=1631019773