There comes a point when beauty alone is not enough.
The older I get, the less interested I am in garments that only work for a version of life I do not live every day. I still love structure. I still love shape. I still love the quiet transformation that happens when the body is properly held. But over time, I found myself less interested in dressing for occasion and more interested in how I actually wanted to live.
My days are full of fabric, pattern drafting, fittings, team meetings, and travel. But I also love the comfort of working from my daybed, often with my cats snuggled beside me. I still want the embrace of a corset. I just no longer want that embrace to require an event.
Perimenopause and age have made that clearer. I can feel the changes in my body and support matters differently now. I still want posture, shape, and that sense of being held together a little more beautifully than nature sometimes arranges on its own. But I want softness too. Flexibility. A garment that could live with me, not merely appear on me.
That was the beginning of creating Myrtle and Zoya.
In my antique collection, I have several knitted corsets dating from about 1908 through the 1920s. The earlier ones, from the late Edwardian period into the 1910s, are made in soft cotton knit with boning and cut long over the hips. I also have a 1920s example in fine silk jersey, made to hold the figure in at the hips, beneath the changing line of dress.
What interested me most was that these garments were not exceptions. They were evidence that corsetry had always been more adaptive than modern mythology allows.
That matters to me.
I was not trying to invent softness where none had existed before. I was following a thread that was already there.
When I found this specialty knit, I wanted to explore that older intelligence in a modern form: a corset soft enough to wear with leggings and a T-shirt, soft enough to rest in, soft enough to disappear beneath a dress, yet still structured enough to support the back, contain the abdomen, shape the waist, and preserve the familiar language of corsetry.
Myrtle is the softer, more everyday expression of that idea. It moves more easily with the body and offers comfort with gentle hourglass shape.
Zoya came from the archive more directly. It is the piece that most closely follows the antique knitted corsets in my collection, with a defined waistline, soft clinging knit, front busk, and back lacing still intact. It offers a stronger, more shapely line while keeping the flexibility and responsiveness that made those historical pieces so compelling to me.
What I care about now is not novelty, but use. Not whether a garment can impress for a moment, but whether it can earn its place through repetition. Whether it can support a real body in a real life. Whether it can be reached for again and again not because it is dramatic, but because it is trusted.
Some garments are admired. Fewer are relied upon.
The older I get, the more I care about the second category.
If you have been curious about softer corsetry for everyday wear, Myrtle and Zoya were designed from exactly that place.
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