The corset is back, writes Janice Breen Burns.

MELINDA Hanley remembers the hard, grippy hug of her first corset and the rising thrill as she watched its effect in a full-length mirror. Her torso kinked dramatically into her waistline, her spine straightened and stretched, she lifted her chin in an automatic counter-reflex. She metamorphosed from gangly 17-year-old girl to tall, shapely woman. "It made me feel like I'd transformed into a supermodel."

Four years on, the memory still sends a shiver. The corset was black, cost $400, and Hanley was halfway through her VCE. No money, no job. She put it on lay-by anyway. "I was in love."

While she waited to own it, paying it off, Hanley, now a second-year fashion student at RMIT and as near to a professional corsetier as you can get, experimented, making her own corsets from scratch.

"They were OK, not so great when I look at them now, but I didn't want to wait. I'd fallen in love with that shape. All these parts of you that you might not really like, suddenly moulded into this lovely, this gorgeous, shape."

http://www.theage.com.au/news/fashion/waist-management/2008/01/17/1200620189262.html