The corset dress is everywhere!

The corset dress is everywhere!

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• 6.21.2010

I'm sure you've seen these dresses around.
The strapless or spaghetti-strap dress with corset/bustier/bra top shaping in the bodice, in cute cottony prints, rocked particularly often by Taylor Swift.  Seriously, I've seen her in them in like four magazines.  Here's just one example of her in a cute grey Rebecca Taylor corset dress:
From InStyle:

(That Rebecca Taylor dress was in that magazine twice, once there, once on Fergie on a little feature about footwear--the exact same dress!  And the pink one was mentioned again in my People Stylewatch that month as something Kirsten Bell would wear for summer!)
Taylor also wore the pink version of the $495 Rebecca Taylor while shopping at Anthropologie in NYC:

And here she is in a Christian Cota (designer I've never heard of) dress at the CMA music festival:

And she dresses up in a John Galliano version:

So I really want to call this the Taylor Swift Dress Post.  But it's not just Taylor; I've seen these cute (and some not so cute) dresses all over stores, magazines and online!
From Anthro:

From Victoria's Secret:

Mod Cloth:

Lulu's:

Some sort of cheap-looking ones from Forever21:

LC Lauren Conrad at Kohl's even has one:

And this one by Leifsdottir:

Even at J.Crew!

Some are more attractive than others, of course, but that's just a small sampling of all the cute corset dresses--and there's quite a bit of variation on style details, actually!
It's a super fun style, but there are pretty much no patterns readily available that I've found (let me know if you know of one!).  I thought about using a bra pattern and drafting a bodice/midriff to add to it, but I also considered just seriously altering this 90's-ey Vogue special occasion pattern, Vogue 8288--I ended up just using the top 1/4 of it and giving it a natural waist and a waistband, and a gathered skirt.

I used a very cute summery blue plaid with a knobby texture that my mom saw at Goodwill and thought I would like.  Fabric there is so cheap!  I think it was $2.99 for the whole piece, which was three or four yards.  I imagined a couple different styles for it, but since it's just a soft lightweight cotton I could see it being sort of frumpy if I made it into something with sleeves or any looseness up top.  So, it was perfect for something like a corset-cut dress!

So fun and summery!