British fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, working from her studio and shop in London, was the central figure in the high-fashion revival of the corset as outerwear through the mid-1980s and into the 1990s. Westwood presented the corset not as a symbol of oppression but as a form of structural armour and erotic power, designed to be worn visibly over or instead of other clothing. Her collections, shown in Paris and London, transformed the corset into a postmodern garment simultaneously referencing history, subverting it, and reclaiming it as female self-expression.

Westwood's corset revival occurred simultaneously with postmodern feminist literary theory's reassessment of femininity, drag, and gender performance — most influentially in Judith Butler's Gender Trouble (1990). The idea that the corset could be ironically or subversively worn rather than simply suffered or rejected aligned with the literary feminist project of 'writing the body' in new ways. Several women poets of the 1990s engaged directly with the aesthetics of Westwood's visible corsetry as a metaphor for creative constraint wielded as power.