This project explores the dimensional relationship between body and dress through using features of corsetry. Where is the garment tight? Where do we place volume and where do we show skin? This project addresses these questions and the construction of dress through broadening the concept of corsetry. With the vision to improve the relationship between body and dress through exploring new methods for an existing technique. Searching for alternative construction techniques in dress which enhances the circular relationship between body, dress and form. By exploring new working methods that includes the body in the process of constructing garments, the corsetry tools has been used to investigate how the garment stays on the body in terms of how we tighten it to the body and by that also give the garment its shape. The project is practice based and built on concrete experiments. The relationship between body, fabric and form has been explored through working hands on with the material on the own body. The design method was developed in the beginning of the project. Further, it was carried out through using rectangular and tube shaped fabrics together with features of corsetry, mainly focusing on eyelets and lacing. Resulting in both a new method for an existing technique, as well as a result that expresses new possibilities in the composition of the dressed body. It also proposes alternative ways of constructing and wearing garments, where the body and the garment work together.

Yes / Corsets have been used both to create a fashionable silhouette and as an orthopaedic treatment for spinal conditions, but skeletal changes associated with the use of corsetry are rarely reported on in the palaeopathological literature. Here, we report on a 19th-century adult male with Pott’s disease of the vertebral column and related vertebral compression deformities, which probably result from the use of a corset. Wolverhampton HB40 presented destruction of the vertebral bodies of T6 to L4, ankylosis of the apophyseal joints of L1 and L2 and an angular kyphosis of the lumbar region, the result of tuberculosis. The presence of flattened spinous processes and bilateral acute angulation of multiple ribs in the lower thoracic region is indicative of plastic deformation caused by the use of the corset. The presence of both of these changes in an adult male, at a time when the use of cosmetic corsets by men was in decline, suggests that the compression trauma was the result of an orthopaedic corset used to correct the defective posture resulting from tubercular kyphosis, although corset use to obtain a fashionable silhouette cannot be ruled out.