There is a scene in the excellent fashion documentary Dior & I when designer Raf Simons is shown the first draft of a dress he has tasked the atelier with producing. It has a classically shaped, strapless, boned corset. He frowns and points to the line above the bust. It is too low, too scooped, he says. It should be higher, straighter. You can sense the unspoken queries from his team. (Shouldn’t a bustier be feminine, revealing? Isn’t that the point?) But then you see the remade dress, with its higher, straighter neckline, and you know Simons is right. His new-look bustier isn’t classic, or romantic. By raising the top of the fabric, and discarding the traditional sweetheart curlicues in favour of a poker-straight line, he takes the strapless dress – a style that recently seemed relevant only to weddings and proms – and turns it into something you’d totally want to wear out for dinner, weather and Pilates-attendance permitting.
It’s a tiny adjustment, but it makes all the difference. (The style has since spread. The one I’m wearing, happily for the price tag, is not by Dior, but by Raey, the brilliant own-label bit of Matches.) I would never have worn a corset-style bustier on this page, but I’m happy to wear the straight kind, because the new version feels more chic and less vulnerable. There’s a shift in attitude disproportionate to the small amount of extra coverage. The fact that this bustier shape pretends your breasts somehow don’t exist makes the half-undressedness of the look less of an issue.
It’s still unnerving to wear. I was a bit, “Where’s my corsage?” but soon came round. A few rules: first, don’t kill the coolness of the neckline by adding a big necklace. Be bold and go with unadorned bare skin. Second, go very high or very low on the hemline: no kneelength skirts, unless you want to look like the ugly stepsister who is a bit old to be a bridesmaid. A mid-thigh hemline works (though with a dress that brief, maybe it’s better off not being tight), as do trousers. Or even ripped jeans, though I suspect the ladies of the Dior atelier would be horrified.
• Jess wears strapless top, £225, by Raey, from matchesfashion.com. Jeans, £78, abercrombie.co.uk. Heels, £275, lkbennett.com.
Styling: Melanie Wilkinson. Hair and makeup: Laurence Close at Carol Hayes Management.
.jpg?w=600)
