Function
Short corsets have been used as light corsets for sleeping or light corsets that may be used next to the skin or over clothing. There are also elastic girdle belt styles that have been used on the inside of shape enhancing garments, on their own as shapeware (items designed to be worn under and not be visible that help smooth, shape the figure to improve look of the wearer.)
There are a number of modern fashions that resemble the styles of the past. From wide elastic belts to actual modern corset styles. The trend and styling of these belts moves rather quickly but the basic design remains the same elastic in the back with some sort of closure in the front meant to define the waist or accent an outfit.
The more traditional boned styles of corset still exist in modern corset making. The corset styles that best represent this classic waist clincher fashion are Spanish belts that can also come with elastic in the back upon request, that acts very much like the more modern belt like styles.
There are more classic corset styles that the lighter styles have mostly adopted their fit and function from still available, they work basically the same way as the elastic and lighter styles giving accent to an outfit or defining a waist but they also offer better back support, some actually serve as a fashionable alternative to certain kinds of medical back braces. These styles include french underbust and long line underbust
Read more about this topic: Waist Cincher
Famous quotes containing the word function:
“The function of literature, through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and the high authority of the self in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive.”
—Lionel Trilling (1905–1975)
“The mother’s and father’s attitudes toward the child correspond to the child’s own needs.... Mother has the function of making him secure in life, father has the function of teaching him, guiding him to cope with those problems with which the particular society the child has been born into confronts him.”
—Erich Fromm (1900–1980)
“As a medium of exchange,... worrying regulates intimacy, and it is often an appropriate response to ordinary demands that begin to feel excessive. But from a modernized Freudian view, worrying—as a reflex response to demand—never puts the self or the objects of its interest into question, and that is precisely its function in psychic life. It domesticates self-doubt.”
—Adam Phillips, British child psychoanalyst. “Worrying and Its Discontents,” in On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored, p. 58, Harvard University Press (1993)