French couturier Paul Poiret, working from his atelier in Paris, declared in 1906 that he was liberating women from the corset with his new designs featuring a high-waisted Empire line and loose, flowing silhouettes inspired by orientalist and neoclassical aesthetics. His pronouncement — and the fashion lines that followed — was partly a marketing strategy, but it coincided with a genuine shift in Parisian couture away from the rigid S-curve silhouette toward softer, more draped garments. Poiret's claim to have freed women was immediately contested by feminists who pointed out that he had replaced one constraint with another.

Poiret's orientalist designs influenced the wave of Symbolist and Imagist poetry that drew on Eastern imagery in the early twentieth century, from W.B. Yeats to the early T.S. Eliot. The feminist pushback against his 'liberation' claim anticipated the critical vocabulary of later women's liberation poetry. Colette, the French writer and sometime poet, gave the most incisive literary account of how Poiret's fashions felt to the women who wore them.