Lacing gaps have always been a hot topic in the corset community, and for good reason – it’s a very easy way to “diagnose” the fit of a corset. When my followers write to ask what might be wrong with the fit of their corset, most are surprised that I’m more interested in how the back of their corset is fitting, rather than the front.
More than 10 years ago I wrote a series of articles going over different lacing gap shapes and sizes (1) (2), but the topic that tends to get the most debate is the acceptable width of a parallel lacing gap. This previous article concludes that a lacing gap of between 1-3 inches in width tend to be almost universally acceptable and seen as both aesthetic and comfortable, but a width of 10% of your natural waist is also a good gauge – so if your natural waist is 50 inches, it’s acceptable to have a lacing gap of 5 inches in the back of your corset. (This becomes important below.)
I would like to put forth the idea that the width of your lacing gap can also be a predictor of your success.
(Mostly pertaining to success regarding your waist training goals, obviously – but if you want to extrapolate that to success in other ambitions in your life, feel free to see the width of your lacing gap as a wider indicator of success, if the shoe (or corset) fits 😉. After all, corseting takes dedication, consistency, patience, and discipline.)
Signs your corset might be too small
As a quick recap: if your corset is giving you a parallel lacing gap, then the proportions are right for your body – but if the width of that parallel lacing gap is more than, say, 15-20% of your natural waist (after it’s been snugly cinched down), the corset may very well be too small in size for you.
(As an example, what this could look like is a 6″ wide gap if your natural waist is 30 inches.)
When a lacing gap is too wide, the fit tends to get a little funky. This is regardless of the brand, because it’s a physics issue, not a construction / brand specific issue.
More important than the aesthetic bug of a too-wide lacing gap is how it affects your comfort. The back of the corset will feel tight – sometimes causing “muffin” (flesh spillover) at the top edge of the corset by the shoulder blades. One of the worse-case scenarios can even be a sciatica-like pain in your bum or back of your hip, if the corset presses awkwardly on your piriformis muscle.
Every good quality corset has flat steels in the back edges to support the lacing system, but these flat steels are supposed to sit over your erector spinae muscles and end at your sacrum (between your “Venus dimples” if you have them). If the corset steels are sitting further apart, then they are sitting partially on your oblique muscles, and probably poking into your glute muscle / iliac crest at the back of your pelvis. (Corsets are not the sole-cause of piriformis syndrome, and of course I’m not a doctor, but it’s still my responsibility to caution you of signs of a poor fit. Pain of any kind is not normal in a corset, and you cannot and should not brute-force waist-train your way into making a wrongly-sized corset fit better.)
A too-small corset will often look “too big” from the front
When the side seams of the corset are pushed too far forward on your body (not lined up with the sides of your body) this can paradoxically make the front of the corset look/feel too loose, not tight. This might be the biggest cause for confusion for beginners, because the corset clearly looks “big” in the mirror, and yet here I am telling them it’s too small.
You might notice a bit of flaring at the ribs and hips, but especially the hips. The “pockets” of space in the corset where your hip bones are supposed to nestle into (if they actually matched up with your pelvis on the sides of your body) are resting at the wrong angle, so they stick out awkwardly in front of your body.
To sum up: a too small corset often causes the corset to feel too loose in the front, yet too tight in the back.
What happens when you wear a correctly sized corset:
In 2011 I reviewed an old-style WKD Morticia corset in size 18″, and then in 2013 I reviewed the same corset in size 22″. In the size 18″ corset I was not able to close it smaller than a 6-inch lacing gap (I was wearing it around 24 inches), while the size 22″ I could completely close. I was able to cinch my waist 2 inches smaller in the larger size corset.
How is this possible? It wasn’t because I had trained my waist down; in 2010 I could easily cinch my waist to 22 inches in the right size corset. My weight and natural measurements were around the same between the two reviews (if anything, I was a little heavier on the right).
The reason is because the side seams of the corset properly hit the sides of my body. The “pockets” where my hip bones are supposed to fill are now sitting at the right place, not angled too far forward (or too far back). The top and bottom of the corset also better matched my natural ribs and hips respectively, yes – that is not to be discounted, but even a too-small corset with the right rib and hip springs can give similar fit issues if the waist size is smaller than your body is ready for.
I also had the right torque to pull the corset closed because the two sides of the lacing system were angled more linearly (closer to 180°), I didn’t have to fight the curve going around my obliques, and I didn’t need the extra arm strength to overcome that angle, if that makes any sense.
Once upon a time, I tried to jump down to a 20 inch corset too quickly and I spent a good 6-12 months backtracking to correct it. My very old bumbling vlogs from 15 years ago are still available on Youtube, for those who care to learn through my mistakes. Although it seems counterintuitive, going back to a size 22″ corset (and a traditional back-lacing corset) was the key to eventually reaching my waist training goals.
“Waaah, buying sequentially smaller sizes is a scam to get you to buy more corsets!”
Yes, some people actually say this, and I can hope you can see now why this is not the case. Corsets are almost never a case of “one and done”, nor should it be. Trying a number of corsets, even just 2 or 3 different ones, is an excellent way to understand the spectrum of quality and construction methods in the corset world. (You don’t need to try as many as I have; >200 is admittedly excessive.) It’s a good way to get to know your body and the way it responds to the compression of a corset. Experimenting with a few corsets (even different brands) will give you context so you can form educated preferences toward more lightweight/ flexible constructions, or more rigid constructions, etc. above and beyond the actual springs/fit of a corset.
(As a brief aside, this is not the first time that I’ve mentioned shopping around. Starting with a budget OTR corset (especially from a reputable brand with a reasonable return policy) is often a low barrier to entry and a gateway into bespoke. If you really fall in love with the corset lifestyle, then you can upgrade to a custom corset later on. While any good custom corsetiere will be able to meet you at the level you’re at, if you come to the table with prior experience, you’ll be able to communicate with a corsetiere from a place of deeper understanding, you’ll be able to confidently keep up with their jargon, and you’ll have more assertion as to what you want out of the commission.)
But I digress. When it comes to corsets, I do not believe in “vanity sizing”. Trying to tightlace in a corset that’s obviously too small for your body or your experience level is a recipe for injury. Sizing down gradually is not only imperative for your comfort and wellbeing, but it will often be more effective for your journey, as shown above with the Morticia corsets.
Wearing corsets while navigating body fluctuations
(If this doesn’t apply to you, feel free to skip this section.) While other reasons/ forms of weight fluctuation will be discussed below, the most commonly discussed is obviously fat loss. I am usually very careful when talking about weight loss in combination with wearing corsets/ waist training, because the two can easily be conflated.
Wearing corsets in and of itself is not a guaranteed weight loss tool. The end; full stop. I remember Andrea Johnson of Lovesick Corrective Apparel (now sadly defunct) was particularly brazen with her wording, but she summed it up effectively (enough so that I remembered it for years after the website was gone!) Per the Wayback Machine:
That being said, it would be irresponsible of me to skirt the subject forever. The combination of corset use with weight loss is worth brief discussion; the reality is that GLP-1 agonist medications have become more and more prevalent in recent years. I know of several folks who don’t own a scale and instead wear their corsets, using the lacing gap (and/or corset sizes in general) as a non-scale gauge to track their journey. While some might use corsets as an NSV (non-scale victory), sometimes their use is for purely practical reasons, like containing loose skin or a panniculus, reducing chafing and increasing their quality of life.
In the past, I have mentioned that if you’re intentionally losing a large amount of weight and you have a limited budget, I might recommend waiting until weight loss has slowed to around 1 pound a week before purchasing a corset. Beyond the obvious issue of a corset quickly becoming too big (always a disappointment), divining the future is still currently hard to do and we can’t predict that your proportions are going to be exactly the same when you drop weight; one person might become more pear-shaped as their weight changes, another person might become less pear-shaped.
(For this reason, if a client insists on purchasing a corset during a chapter in their life where they anticipate future weight loss, cosmetic procedures, hormone changes, or other dramatic transformations, I will sometimes recommend a style with adjustable hip ties like these or these so the hip-to-waist ratio can be fine-tuned to adapt to their own bodily changes.)
How much weight can I gain/lose and still fit into the same corset?
It’s a little different for everybody, but among the folks I’ve collaborated with (and my own personal experience), the difference of around 15 lbs (~7kg) is usually the point that a person would size down (or up) in a corset. However, the Toilet Paper effect is real, so I’m more comfortable giving a percentage of about 10% body weight.
Exceptions exist, obviously. In folks who tend to accumulate inches in their waistline almost exclusively (especially visceral fat and not subcutaneous fat – often in AMAB wearers), as little as 5 lbs can make a difference.
Other bodily fluctuations to consider
After speaking with so many corseters for my book, Solaced, I also acknowledge that body fluctuations exist – sometimes extreme fluctuations of 15 lbs or more from one week to the next, due to edema, Chagas-related bloating, PCOS, as a side effect of blood pressure medications, or various other health issues / medications. While corsets are many things, being “one size fits all” is certainly not one of them.
While I do not make medical-grade corsets, I do have a potential solution that’s going to be released soon. I teased it on Patreon last week, and it’s going to be released later in November. If you (much like myself) have experienced changes to your body size but you don’t want to let go of your old corsets, this accessory may become a game changer. I can’t wait to tell you more about it when I’m allowed 🥰 but if you’re currently stuck with a corset that’s too small to wear comfortably/effectively, this will shift the side seams closer to the sides of your body where they should be (and help close the gap in the back), ultimately making your corsets functional and wearable again without requiring you to purchase an entirely new corset.
Lucy, I am so happy you are still doing this work for the corseting community and corset-curious alike! And I’m excited to see what you have brewing!