On a warm evening in May, Lauren Sánchez Bezos walked the red carpet at New York’s legendary Met Gala wearing a sculpted, midnight-blue satin gown with a plunging neckline. The dress code for the party was “Fashion Is Art,” and Sánchez Bezos and her designer, Schiaparelli’s Daniel Roseberry, drew inspiration from the museum’s famous John Singer Sargent portrait “Madame X,” a 19th-century painting of an American socialite posing in a sultry black gown. The painting had at one point sparked scandal for the form-fitting sexiness and bejeweled straps of its dress, and Sánchez Bezos suggested Roseberry take it up a notch: “Let’s do a waist,” she told him. Roseberry complied — snugly binding her abdomen in a corseted style that visibly laced up her back.
The cinched waist looked familiar on Sánchez Bezos, harkening back to the many outfits she wore during her extravagant Venice nuptials in June 2025, including a tight-laced, corseted wedding gown that could have been pulled straight from the Victorian era in which the real Madame X resided. And she is hardly alone. “The tiny, tortured waist has returned as a bodily preoccupation,” The New York Times reported last fall, “ready to eclipse voluminous breasts and buttocks as areas of obsession, manipulation, distortion and angst.”
But the waist is not simply a matter of fashion. It is, increasingly, a statement of values. We’ve reverted “to a sense of what a woman should wear and look like that is restrictive,” historian Stephanie Coontz, who has studied the prevalence of the hourglass shape in modern culture, told me. The idea is that clothing should “show off your body and your fertility and your sexuality more than anything else about your personality.” For powerful women on the right, the uniform has become severe, as exemplified by the nipped-waist dresses worn by Kimberly Guilfoyle and Ivanka, Lara and Melania Trump.
This trend is, in fact, an old story. Fashion, like politics, is cyclical, and in periods of conservatism, the cinched waist tends to reign. It has previously been correlated not only with patriarchy and threats to women’s rights but also with rising authoritarianism. Since the start of the second Trump administration, there has been a lot of chatter about “Mar-a-Lago face” — the artificially enhanced lips, chins and cheeks common among MAGA women. But the implicit politics of a surgically distorted face is a recent development. Historically, if you want to know where politics is headed, a better guide has been the constriction of women’s waists.
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Every era has its silhouette — that is, “the prevailing shape of any period and the way that clothes contour the body,” says Victoria Pass, a professor of fashion and design history at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Over the centuries, she told me, different body parts have been amplified, and others diminished.
The invention of modern corsetry in the early 1600s allowed for the artificial shaping of women’s bodies. The corset was a garment of varying uses; before the invention of the brassiere, for instance, it served the valuable function of a bra. It also, however, became a powerful symbol of constraint: a way to restrict not just women’s bodies but also their ambition and autonomy.
In times of rebellion and revolution, therefore, women tended to eject the hourglass shape from their wardrobes. The women of the French Revolution traded the monarchy’s painfully heavy and structured gowns for simpler, chemise-styled empire waists. In 1800s America, suffragists drew a clear link between clothes and political liberty, arguing that unencumbered bodies allowed for unencumbered lives. Mary Walker, one of the country’s first female surgeons, heroically saved injured soldiers on the battlefields of the Civil War, only to dodge raw eggs lobbed at her in public when she ditched the requisite, and repressively tight-waisted, dresses of the day. She called corsets “torso prisons” owing to the enormous pressure they put on a woman’s internal organs, and she was routinely threatened with jail time for wearing pantsuits instead.
In political cartoons, suffragists who eschewed corsetry and traditional attire were widely mocked for being “manly” and abandoning their domestic duty. One cartoon depicted a perky blond in a pantsuit smoking a cigar and striding for the door on her way to vote while her bedraggled husband rocked a baby. As backlash to the suffrage movement grew at the turn of the last century, new municipal codes and state laws made it illegal to appear in public wearing clothes not matching your assigned birth gender. Women faced arrest, or the risk of being sent to a psychiatric institution, for not following conservative dress codes. At the same time, the corset became part of a new “S” curve meant to exaggerate a woman’s bosom, thin her waist and push out her backside.
By 1920, white women had earned the right to vote, and flappers jettisoned their mother’s corsets for short, tubular dresses. The flapper style erased visible class distinctions: Women of different races wore it, as did the wealthy and those who worked for a living; suddenly, you couldn’t easily identify class differences based on apparel. It also led to a moral panic: If a woman could dress that easily and with so few layers of undergarments, she could certainly undress just as quickly. Women’s fashion was soon being blamed for divorce, and, Fortune magazine reported in 1930, “many speculative persons believe that a return to dignity and formalism in attire presages an accompanying return to statelier morals and manners.”
As conventional dressmaking once more dictated that women force themselves into structured clothes, a young American fashion designer named Claire McCardell (who I wrote about in a new biography) refused to go backwards. She argued that a woman’s clothes should enable her ambitions, and that women should have the freedom to work and to participate in public and political life. She cut her garments to fit a woman’s natural body. Corsets “push you out of any resemblance to the way nature made you,” she said. The purpose of clothes should be to support a person’s lived experience. “I don’t hate crinolines as such,” she once joked about the material that enhances a woman’s skirt. “I hate them when they try to get in elevators.”
McCardell, along with a group of mostly women designers in New York, led a fashion revolution by inventing the American Look, sportswear that prioritized comfort and movement in women’s clothes. McCardell revived and updated the classic, simple wrap dress. She popularized leggings and put pockets in all her clothes; she also invented ballet flats and mix-and-match separates, which became staples of modern fashion. Comfort, she said, was the keynote of style, and she placed closures in easy reach of the wearer, so that a woman could dress herself without needing help closing a back zipper. “In the days of dependent women — fainting women, delicate flowers, laced to breathless beauty — a girl couldn’t cross the street without help,” McCardell wrote. “Her mission in life was to look beautiful and seductive while the men took care of the world’s problems. Today women can share the problems (and possibly help with them) partly because of their newfound freedom from clothes.”
Meanwhile in Europe, fashion was becoming a powerful tool for shaping cultural conformity under fascism. Propaganda in Germany and Italy showed women wearing shapely peasant attire surrounded by cherubic children. The traditional dirndl, a dress with a cinched waist perhaps best known as classic Oktoberfest attire, became pervasive during the reign of Hitler and closely tied to his supremacist notions of Germanic “purity.” Young women in the anti-Nazi group the Edelweiss Pirates refused to wear the prescribed clothes as part of a broader rebellion against the regime, risking their lives in the process.
American women went to work in droves during World War II, dressed in the practical and freeing garments created by designers like McCardell, only to be ordered back to the kitchen when the men returned. In 1947, Christian Dior reintroduced a severe hourglass silhouette in his first-ever collection. The French fashion designer said he wanted to “save women from nature,” comparing their idealized shape to the number eight: wide at the ample bosom, extremely thin at the waist, and wide again at the swelling hips. He famously took a hammer to a standardized wooden mannequin to whittle the waist to his preferred size of 18 inches, which was about 11 inches smaller than the average waist in the 1940s. To achieve his hourglass, women wore shoulder and hip pads, padded bras and tight-laced corsets. The collection became known as the New Look, even though it represented a reversion to Victorian era restriction.
In a 1955 article, headlined “The Gal Who Defied Dior,” McCardell told a young journalist named Betty Friedan, “You can’t go back. You have to design for the lives American women lead today.” Like McCardell, American women initially protested Dior’s extremism — as did men, including one Idaho husband who complained to Dior: “You have disfigured my wife with your genius.” But eventually the New Look’s hourglass became the aesthetic of the 1950s housewife. Then, the pendulum swung back again in the 1960s and ’70s. All American women finally gained access to the polls thanks to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, while second-wave feminism led women to shed the thin-waisted dresses and aprons of their mothers.
Still, the severely nipped waist of the hourglass has never permanently gone away. For centuries, women have tried to kill it — and failed. Last summer, Dior revived its New Look silhouette and put it on pop star Sabrina Carpenter.
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Today, with Trump in the White House and authoritarian ideas experiencing a revival, the hourglass silhouette has again become shorthand for traditionalism. In 2024, the anti-feminist women’s magazine Evie released a “raw milkmaid” dress, modeled after the dirndls worn by “hardworking dairymaids” of Europe, as the ad copy extolled. It featured a severely scooped neckline and a structured bodice with corset boning “that cinches the waist beautifully.” The hourglass silhouette can be seen both in Washington’s halls of power and among the cultural figures shaping the next generation of conservative women. Influencer Savanna Faith Stone, a speaker at this summer’s Turning Point USA Women’s Leadership Summit, can be found baking on her social media feed in an hourglass dress with cut-out waist details. She also contends that women should stay home, defer their political vote to their husband and “dress however your husband likes.” (Never mind that the women delivering such traditionalist messages, like 1970s conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly before them, often lead public lives and make money outside the parameters of the gendered domesticity they decree for everyone else.)
The increased emphasis on the “strong hourglass,” Sara Jablon-Roberts, an associate professor of fashion merchandising at Sam Houston State University, told me, “harkens back to the ’50s, which itself harkened back to the Victorian age.” But the latest incarnation features modern twists, where medical technology has dramatically extended the possibilities afforded by diet, exercise and shapewear. Last fall, New York Times reporter Linda Wells described a new, painful procedure in which a woman’s lower two ribs are fractured and trimmed down to achieve an indented midsection. After the surgery, a woman must don a corset full-time for months to help reshape her body.
One argument for the endurance of the hourglass is that men find it inherently preferable. This evolutionary reasoning, Coontz writes in her latest book, is a myth. When researchers showed images of women with classic hourglass measurements to isolated hunter-gatherer societies, the men deemed the women not only unattractive, but unhealthy. “One speculated,” Coontz writes, “that the poor thing was suffering from severe diarrhea!”
In truth, far from being an evolutionary imperative, the hourglass has, historically, been the shape of wealth and class and whiteness. Few can afford the luxury of dressing or refashioning their bodies this way, let alone the family structure where only one spouse earns wages for their labor and domestic work is uncompensated.
Even some conservatives are growing alarmed over right-wing fashion. Megyn Kelly short-circuited on her podcast after Sánchez Bezos wore a bustier to Trump’s inauguration, saying she looked pornographic. Marjorie Taylor Greene, an outspoken advocate for the release of the Epstein files, last year criticized what she called “MAGA Mar-a-Lago sexualization”: the many women clambering to dress themselves to the president’s rapacious predilections. “I have two daughters,” Greene told the Times, “and I’ve always been uncomfortable with how those women puff up their lips and enlarge their breasts.”
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In July, the fashion house Schiaparelli — the one that designed Sánchez Bezos’s Met Gala gown — held its fall couture show in Paris. Models walked the runway in dresses featuring corseted tops made of form-fitting silicone sculpted to resemble a naked body replete with breasts, a belly button and an ultrathin waist. The backs were laced with ribbons, evoking a traditional corset. Roseberry, the creative director, named the collection “The Call of the Void,” equating the act of making these clothes to the feeling of driving off a cliff and into an abyss. The collection, he said, was part of the fashion house’s long history of pushing boundaries in shape and material. But the sight of so many breast-plated models, coupled with his cliff imagery, instead called to mind the fateful last scene in “Thelma and Louise”: Women have been pushed to the edge.
A round of applause for @Schiaparelli Couture FW26 👏 pic.twitter.com/WGb4x0b74q
— Fashion (@XFashion) July 6, 2026
Elsa Schiaparelli, who founded the eponymous couture house, was a dissident against the conformity of 1930s Fascist Italy — a designer who harnessed humor and extremity in defiance of the status quo. “In difficult times, fashion is always outrageous,” she once said. Now, we’ve merely captured the outrageousness of the oppressive.
When Sánchez Bezos wore her custom Schiaparelli to the Met Gala, fashion critics dismissed it as derivative and dull. And they were right. More, the return to the cinched waist reflects a nascent authoritarianism that seeks to suffocate the diversity of democratic culture in its tight-laced grip. And yet, there is hope. “We’ve done this before,” Coontz told me. “That’s what they did after World War II, and [women] didn’t like it.” In fact, they started a revolt in fashion and in politics. One that fueled a wave of activism, earned women legal and financial rights — and advanced the hard, necessary, ever-incomplete work of ushering in a better country for all of us.
Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson is the author of “Claire McCardell: The Designer Who Set Women Free.”
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