Is this the daftest and most dangerous fashion trend yet?
How girls as young as 16 are risking their health in agonisingly tight corsets in a bid to copy celebrities
DrESSEd in her blue blazer and plaid skirt, Gabriella deith looks every inch the smartly dressed, private-school pupil. Underneath her uniform, however, the 16-year-old is hiding a troubling secret.
For while preparing to take ten GCSEs this summer at one of Britain’s most elite girls’ schools, Gabriella is wearing a tight corset in an attempt to whittle down her already tiny waist.
Like many of her peers who also follow the corset trend, Gabriella’s inspiration is not to emulate the upright posture of Victorian ladies who wore corsets so tight they’d faint and permanently deform their rib cages.
Instead, she’s using one to try to force her body into the same extreme hour-glass shape as her favourite celebrity Kim Kardashian, who has posted pictures of herself on social media using corsets to ‘waist-train’ her body to ever more cartoonish proportions.
Gabriella, who comes from a comfortable, middle- class home in Godstone, Surrey, believes the device will help her achieve two, some would say mutually exclusive, goals.
‘I want a really curvy figure like Kim Kardashian, but I want to be skinny at the same time,’ she says. ‘I don’t know if that’s possible, but I’d like to give it a try. So I’m wearing a corset eight hours a day. I also do squats in the gym to make my bottom bigger.’
So intent is Gabriella on attaining her idol Kim’s pneumatic curves that she says she sometimes sleeps in her corset, which she also conceals from teachers under her baggy sports top during PE lessons, believing the rubber device will make her sweat more and speed up her weight loss.
She and many thousands of young women like her are adopting the corset trend despite warnings from doctors that constricting the midsection of the body can potentially harm the major internal organs, damage skin and restrict breathing.
Gabriella started wearing a corset she bought on the internet in February, shortly after her 16th birthday. A few weeks ago she took delivery of an even smaller one that promised to squeeze her waist to 24in — 10in smaller than the national average.
It’s so tight that at school mealtimes she is able only to eat salad leaves. ‘When I wear a corset, the food doesn’t go down properly so I don’t eat as much,’ she says. ‘ But I don’t worry. All I care about are the results and I believe it has made my waist a different shape. I think if I start training my body now, it will look really good when I’m older.
‘When I upload pictures showing off my waist on [picture- sharing website] Instagram, I get loads more “likes”, which boosts my confidence.’
Gabriella’s mother Francesca realised what her daughter was doing when the second corset arrived through the post. She was horrified.
‘As soon as I realised, I told her all the health reasons she shouldn’t do it,’ says the 43-year- old housewife, whose husband Matthew is a company director. ‘ But she won’t listen. She just wants the results now. The sad thing is that I don’t know a girl of her age who is happy with her body.’
Indeed, Gabriella says the trend is spreading like wildfire among her classmates — she knows five others who also wear corsets to school.
For me, an author specialising in books about parenting girls, of even more concern is that a quick flick though Twitter reveals hundreds more girls like Gabriella posing side-on in corsets, some pulled so tight you wonder where they’ve put their organs.
But it’s not just schoolgirls who are ‘waist-training’. Joanna Costa, a 27year- old criminology graduate who works as a financial adviser, bought one last month and wears it for up to four hours a day.
It’s too early to see results, but Joanna admits it keeps her on her feet all day — because it digs into her chest and thighs when she sits down.
But she still believes it’s worth it: ‘I’m building up a tolerance to it because it’s quite tight. It works better than any shape underwear and under clothes it looks amazing.’
So what’s behind this deeply disturbing obsession with getting a preternaturally tiny waist?
Of course, for centuries the waist has been a potent symbol of femininity. Anthropologists say a quick glance at this part of a woman’s anatomy has always enabled a man to work out roughly how old a female is because the area thickens with age — or if she’s already pregnant by a rival. But it seems it’s no longer just the circumference that matters — it’s also its size in comparison to a woman’s bottom. Nowadays, women dream of having a tiny waist and big behind — another look popularised by Kim Kardashian, whose buttocks appear to be twice that of her midriff.
Its roots are also partly mired in internet pornography, where larger bottoms have become a deeply desirable female body part. A teeny waist is also a must in order to emphasise the fullness of the buttocks. There are dozens of porn websites with name like ‘tiny waists and big booties’.
And a defined waist has become the ultimate status symbol in a society where rising obesity has led to the rise of the apple-shaped silhouette.
One government- backed study found that women’s waistlines have expanded by more than 6in over the past 50 years to around 34in, while the hips and bust have grown by just 1in.
In a culture no longer divided by class, but by size, a nipped- in midsection is the most obvious sign that you belong to an elite minority.
Trainer and nutritionist Max Smith is seeing a growing number of female clients asking him to help them get smaller waists and larger behinds.
‘It’s become a sign of femininity as important for women as broad shoulders are for men,’ says Max, who is based in Kensington, West London. ‘It’s not just that women think it’s what men want — it’s also that the curvier they are, the more womanly they feel’.
Some women even wear them in the gym. ‘By using these corsets, you are actually stopping the body’s core muscles from working, by making them weaker,’ says Max. ‘This stops them stabilising the spine and prevents you from breathing properly, putting women at real risk.’
Yet not only do some work out in them, others go to dangerous extremes, lacing their corsets as tightly as possible.
Every morning for the past two months, 19-year-old Olivia Khan has pulled the strings of her leather one, which is reinforced with steel rods, ever tighter despite warnings from her mother — a nurse. She takes it off only to shower and sleep.
‘I wear it every day. It’s like a part of me,’ says the waitress who lives with her parents in Warrington, Cheshire. ‘The tighter I have it, the better I feel. I want to wear it to get dramatic results.’
They are dramatic — she can’t sit or bend down while wearing it. She also sounds constantly breathless.
But to Olivia it’s worth it to instantly shave 3in off her already- slim 25in waist. Eventually, by continually compressing her body by force, she hopes to hone it down to 18in.
In fact, she’s so obsessed that she recently spent £4,500 on a trip to a
‘Wearing a corset means I can’t eat as much’ ‘This is self-harm — it’s madness to bring them back’
Miami clinic to get fat from her thighs injected into her bottom.
‘I have to keep wearing the corset or my body will go back to the way it was before,’ says Olivia. ‘I suppose I do look like Jessica Rabbit now. Even my dad says that I look like a cartoon character, but I don’t mind.’
She might look ‘on trend’ now, but Olivia could be storing up problems for the future. While corsets have been around since the 1500s, they reached their zenith in the Victorian era. Doctors were so worried about crush injuries in patients that they campaigned against the fashion.
Corsets were blamed for anaemia, blood clots, fainting fits, infertility, miscarriage and digestive problems. Wearers even had their own disease, chlorosis — or the green disease, named after the deathly pallor they got from lack of blood in their faces.
X-rays from the turn of the 20th century show distorted ribs and compressed lungs, while examination of skeletons of women from the period have found that those whose rib cages were tightly squeezed were the most likely to have died young, often during childbirth.
Thankfully corsets went out of fashion during the World War I when women had to do physical work. Yet now it seems we are moving back in time. Websites say the ‘corset diet’ — as the wearing of one has been termed — works like an ‘external gastric band’ without the surgery.
Books like WaistTraining 101 peddle dangerous myths like ‘no evidence has ever been furnished proving that corsets are harmful’ and ‘ our organs easily adapt to being gradually moved, as they do during pregnancy.’
Consultant gastro-instestinal surgeon Professor Basil Ammori, based at Cheadle’s BMI Alexandra Hospital, says such claims are ‘laughable.’
‘The increased pressure on the abdomen would slow down the return of the blood from the legs through the abdomen so there could be an increased risk of blood clots in the legs,’ he says.
‘It may also put pressure on weak spots in the abdomen so women could develop hernias where parts of the stomach slip up in the chest.
‘It could also affect breathing if someone has a lung disease. There is also the danger of prolapsed wombs and haemorrhoids.’
He adds: ‘Even if a corset does make it hard to eat big meals, as some companies claim, I very much doubt it would stop the wearers eating, because they can still snack on high- calorie foods and drink high- calorie drinks like alcohol.’
But perhaps even more disturbing is the ideal of a tiny waist is now being sold to even very young children. Recent films, like Disney’s Cinderella, starred a title character with a waist so small that the first reaction of the audience was to ask if it was a special effect.
In order for actress Lily James to achieve the look, she wore a corset so tight she could only eat liquid foods while wearing it.
It doesn’t take long for our daughters — who are also being targeted with Cinderella dolls with similar tiny waists — to look in the mirror and wonder why they don’t have the same fairytale proportions. Indeed, ask Gabriella if she has ever liked her body, and she instantly replies: ‘No’. ‘I haven’t really liked my body since I was 12,’ she says. ‘Everyone in my year is really skinny so I started to going to the gym two-and-a-half years ago.’
For Deanne Jade, founder of the National Centre for Eating Disorders, young women using corsets to whittle away their waists amounts to no less than self-harm.
‘To me, it sounds like the female equivalent of the hair shirt,’ she says. ‘It’s the latest subtle way girls are punishing themselves for not having the “perfect body”.
‘Women threw out their corsets and girdles in the Sixties and liberated their bodies. It is simply madness to bring this back.’
As a mother of two young daughters who believes that women’s rights should go forwards, not backwards, I can only agree.