tight-laced

A response to the stifling, tight-laced Victorian art and attitudes of the mid19th century, it expressed a startlingly modern set of ideas that culminated in the creative flowering of a coterie of artist and poet friends--the Pre-Raphaelites.

But every so often we break out of this tight-laced straitjacket and go for something truly out of character - something big, bold and brash that belongs to a different world.

However, now the actress, the daughter of QC Oliver Blunt, is determined to leave the bonnets and tight-laced corsets behind.

There can be too much brand ego on display and the specialness, the character and the wistfulness are replaced by a tight-laced formula that is about anything but a more relaxed and desirable lifestyle and, ironically, then weakens and waters down the offer.

On the other hand, Elektra, another comic-book adaptation, might turn heads in her tight-laced scarlet bustier, but her personal magnetism doesn't measure up: She's a gloomy assassin who suffers from nightmares, insomnia, and OCD.

By the 1890s the students at Smith and Spelman and the women students at Cornell rejected the confining clothing of tight-laced corsets and trailing skirts of the current fashionable dress for simple shirtwaist blouses and dark skirts, characteristic of the reform dress of that era.

Even more amazing is that this project found a home not in Woodstock but in Woodlawn, side by side with the tombs of all those straight, wealthy, tight-laced WASPS.

Does the fashion industry, with its periodic confining fashions, such as the tight-laced corsets of the 1950s or the current pointed toes on shoes, always manage to slip away from feminist reform?