Business Section, Malcolm Parry

Melanie Talkington need only look over her shoulder and into the mirror to see her Kitsilano-based Lace Embrace Atelier firm’s bottom line. It is the bottom line.

”Thirtyish” Talkington makes corsets. And not he mildly modified bustiers club-goers wear based on contemporary drafting techniques and blocks. Her $400-to-$3000 garments emulate the Victorian era’s bust-lifting, tummy-flattening, waist-cinching, hip-flaring real thing.

She’s not just guessing either. When her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother couldn’t answer her pre-teen questions about what made Dolly Parton look that way in The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas, Talkington began assembling a collection of 108 authentic corsets that may be Canada’s largest.

Meanwhile, the world’s smallest waist has put Talkington’s creations on American prime-time TV. Viewers of the Tyra Banks Show tonight and Oct. 25 will see Talkington – HYPERLINK "http://www.laceembrace.com" www.laceembrace.com – and five-time client Cathie Jung. She’s the so-called “corset queen,” whose 15-inch waist got her into the Guinness Book of World Records – an accomplishment that Guinness stout would doubtless nullify.

The show was taped in L.A. Sept. 22, Talkington says, with the segment aimed to attract supermodel-actress Banks’s younger-women audience.

Her own bull’s-eye market is her own age group, says Talkington, who earlier appeared on the national Canadian TV show Vanity Insanity and assorted news-magazine programs.
The show appearance will doubtless boost Talkington’s still-six-figures business. So will an order she received Tuesday from the three-year friend Dita von Teese (real name Heather Sweet), the burlesque star and fetish supermodel who is married to rocker Marily Manson (real name Brian Warner). Von Teese ordered two garments to wear in a Rhinestone Cowgirl advertising campaign for the MAC cosmetics firm.
She should get steadier business encouragement from a recent invitation to join a trade mission to Argentina. While there, she contracted to have some mid-range ($200-$300) non-custom corsets made in Buenos Aires, and also to import several lingerie items.
She’ll fly to Shanghai Oct. 18 to participate in two more fairs and likely sign further lingerie and fabric-importing deals.
As for classical corsets being painfully constricting, Talkington says that’s all whalebone: “There’s been a lot of taboo since that time. But thousands and thousands of women wore them, so they couldn’t have been that uncomfortable. I wanted to know what a real Victorian woman experienced. Now I have. They’re very… embracing.”