For some, the word ‘corset’ conjures up images of Victorian women wincing while being strapped into their brutally restrictive whalebone undergarments.

Although corsets are still available in various forms, including the ‘waist trainers’ beloved by the Kardashian sisters, they’re not always viewed in a positive light.

Many are quick to dismiss them as a relic of outdated, rigid, even damaging beauty standards.

Yet for Australian author and journalist Tara Moss, the appeal of corsets is not purely aesthetic.

Moss has worn corsets for two decades — even branching into making her own recently — and has loved the look of them for as long as she can remember.

Now, as she explains in the anthology Solaced: 101 Uplifting Narratives About Corsets, Well-Being, and Hope,her love of them is two-fold.

Last October, the self-described “midcentury vintage nerd” realised the garments provided effective relief for the health condition she’d been living with since her teenage years.

Moss has curvature of the spine, or scoliosis, and has explored various avenues — including yoga, pain killers and seeing osteopaths — to manage the resulting chronic pain.

When she developed pain during a writing session one afternoon, theSpeaking Outauthor instinctively reached for an old underbust.

“Perhaps I had medical corsets in mind that day (they are often structurally similar) and I unconsciously craved the stiff posture support,” Moss muses in her piece, also published on Daily Life.

“Whatever the reason, by the end of that day, I discovered something curious — my neck and upper back felt ‘lighter’.”

The writer worked for hours that afternoon without developing a headache or neck tension, and experienced the same result the following day. It was a revelation.

“Finally the penny dropped: the corsets I had loved the look of for as long as I can remember could do far more for me than I’d given them credit for,” she writes.

Moss argues the reason it took her so long to make this connection stems from the historical narrative that corsets only cause women physical pain, rather than ameliorate it — a belief she describes as unfounded “hysteria”.

“[The root] seems to be the idea that women, as an entire sex, cannot be trusted to know their own minds and bodies. There could apparently be no comfortable or moderate corset wear for women, only masochism and dangerous vanity,” she writes.

“What we find again and again is the idea of the corset itself—or the woman who wears one—as a corruptor. A woman with a corset is a threat or a victim.”

These days Moss uses corsets to aid her curved spine and exercises to build what back strength she can, and her doctor is aware of this approach. (Post continues after gallery.)

Tara Moss on Instagram