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.