Corset safari

There comes a time in a woman’s life when she needs a new corset, that most intimate and reality-altering bit of personal engineering. A corset is the bane of young Lizzie’s existence, if you’ll recall from the opening pages of A Lady of Resources. But for me, circumstances were different. I didn’t want one to act as a foundation garment, but to go on over my outer layer as more of an accessory.

Where I live, a woman has three options. She can make her corset. She can order online (at corset-story, for instance), or she can gather her girlfriends and take a safari to Dark Garden. So off we went—romance superstar Bella Andre, erotic romance author Jasmine Haynes, travel writer Jacqueline Yau, and I—and what a time we had! Aided by the patient and skilled Sophie, we had some decisions to make. Overbust? Underbust? Corselet? Cincher?

In the end, after having tried on several styles and realizing that my short waist didn’t lend itself to the overbust style, despite the svelte line it created, I went with an underbust Dollymop, which gives me the freedom of movement to do anything from dancing to carting boxes of books into a convention hall. Bella also chose a corset, Jacqueline already owns one (she is the architect of the safari in the first place), and Jasmine deferred the decision to another day.

And don’t even get me started on the hats!