Lucy’s Corsetry Review: Gia Black Satin Corset Belt

Watch this recent review of our Gia Black Satin Corset Belt from Lucy of Lucy’s Corsetry (lucycorsetry.com).

Video Transcription

Hi, everybody, today I’m reviewing probably the shortest corset I have ever worn. This is the Gia Corset Belt by Glamorous Corset. So, here’s the front, the side, the back, and the other side.

For the length and fit of this corset, it is six inches in the center front here. At the princess seam it is five inches. And it is distributed pretty equal distantly from the waist up to the waist down. At the side seam here, just four and a half inches. So, it’s so small. And in the center back here, it is six and a half inches.

The Gia that I’m wearing today is size 22. So, it’s 22 inches, if laced closed in the very back. I’m wearing it with about a two inch wide lacing gap in the back. So, I’m wearing it at about 24 inches. When I mentioned the straight out of the box the waistline measured true. The top edge here, the rib cage measured 24 inches. So, it has a two inch rib spring. And the bottom edge here measured 26 inches. So, it has a four inch hip spring. But keep in mind, even though those are very gentle springs, this does not come even close to my under bust area, which is actually right here. And it does not come close to covering my hip bones and my aces of my hip bones are right around here. So, you can use this as a gentle nip in the waistline just like this if you like it this way. Or you can use this as the finishing belt. So, if I want to stealth a different corset underneath my clothing and then put this over top to make it look like I have a very smooth and streamlined silhouette, a tiny waist, and no muffin top in the back. What I have done was I wore the Gia belt over longer and a high back corset with a conical ribcage. And it had a really stunning silhouette. That being said, it is quite a lot of layers because I was wearing a tank top, which I used as a liner, and then a bigger corset, and then a looser shirt, and then this belt over top. So, it was four layers. So, this might be better suited for wearing in the wintertime or in slightly cooler climates. Perhaps not suited for a tropical setting.

So, let’s go to the tabletop portion of this review and I can show you the details of the Gia corset belt close up.

So, here is the Gia corset belt laid flat. And it is so small. I’m losing my mind a little bit about this. So, for the materials, it has three main layers. The fashion fabric is black satin. It has an interlining in between the fashion fabric and the lining. And then the lining here is 100 percent black cotton twill. And this is what the labels look like. So, the Glamorous Corset label here. And the fabric content and cleaning instructions.

Now, Glamorous Corset tags are pretty hefty. And this corset belt is almost like just long enough in the back here to be able to display both labels side by side. If it was any shorter than this, they might have been like slightly overlapped. Actually, they are a tiny little bit overlapped. And here’s the size.

Turning this corset on its side, it has a four panel pattern, one, two, three, four. And the pattern pieces are actually very interesting because the seam between panels one and two actually go down in a V-shape to what I would assume, if this were longer, the bones would converge to add more control for the lower tummy. I think probably the reason that they did this was more stylistically in the corset belt so that you can tell the top from bottom. So, this kind of goes in a V-shape so that panel one tapers.

Panel two is actually tapers in the other direction. It is actually shorter at the top edge, wider at the bottom going over the hip bone here. And it really is so short that it just cuts right up and over the hip bone.

Panel three is kind of a little bit more on the straight side. And panel four, the center back here, is a little bit wider at the top edge, more tapered on the bottom edge, slightly mirroring the panel shape in the center front. And this is constructed using the welt-seam method, like all the other corsets or the non-mesh style corsets from Glamorous Corset. So, I’ll have a video up in the cards or down in the description below of all the most common construction methods for off the rack corsets. And the welt-seam method is a relatively strong one. So, you don’t have to worry that this will break, seams will rip, or anything like that. It’s just a different way of assembling the panels together.

And if I pull this taut and sort of feel in the middle of the panel here, I do actually feel a small ridge right here in between the layers. So, that is the waist tape. And I am guessing that it is one inch wide. And it runs from the panels one and two here, all the way back to the center back edge here. And it is obviously invisibly stitched between the layers.

And the binding is made from matching strips of black satin machine finished on both outside and inside. So, on the outside, you have a little stitch in the ditch right there. And on the inside, you have that little lip, the top stitching here. Because the satin is relatively thinner. They folded it over and stitched it down, so it has a nice folded edge here. There is no raw edge, no surged edge. And because the corset belt is so very short, they decided that they would not put any garter tabs in this corset.

The modesty panel is a 4 ¾ inches wide, so that will cover a lacing gap of about four inches. This is unstiffened and stitched to one side of the corset here with just a row of stitching so you can take a seam ripper and remove that if you hate modesty panels. And this is finished in the same black satin on the outside and black cotton twill on the inside. And there’s also a narrow modesty plaquette here, sticking out from the nob side of the bust. And it’s finished in black satin as well.

And the bust is only five inches long. So, it’s just a little baby bust. And has three loops and pins. All equal distantly spaced. It is a half inch wide bust on each side. But finished in stainless steel. So, it’s not like your standard flexible bust with the white bone. It has the stainless steel bone in it, so that means it’s very rigid. Especially because of its length. And this has a total of 16 bones, eight on each side. So, it’s double boned on the seams here with quarter inch wide spirals, two, four, six.

When it comes to something this short, especially when it comes to accentuating the silhouette as much as you possibly can when it comes to both the shortness and the moderate-ness of the hip springs and the ribs springs. I would almost suggest that this would be a single boned or like one bone on the seam, one bone in the middle of the panel, so that they’re more dispersed. Because as I’m wearing this, what I find is that the bones, since they’re so short, like they don’t want to bend much. And so, you’re losing what little actual curvaceous silhouette is in here to begin with. It might be less so with the larger sizes. But I still think that it would be better for the bones to be dispersed so that they’re doing their job properly. They are providing that vertical tension to prevent wrinkling from occurring. But they are not so stiff as to impede or interfere with the proper silhouette that you’re supposed to get out of this. That’s determined by the actual shape of the pattern pieces.

So, if I had to give my feedback on how I would probably like improve, not even the pattern, but like just the way that this was constructed, that’s what I would do. Like one bone on the seam and one bone in the middle of the panel.

And moving on, there are two stainless steel quarter inch wide flat steel bones by the grommets here, so that makes eight on one side and 16 total.

And there are a total of 14 grommets in the back of this corset, seven on each side. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. And they are set more or less kind of equal distantly spaced, about three quarters of an inch apart. They are a size double zero with a small to medium flange and finished in silver.

And on the underside, you can see that there are nice wide washers. Most of these have rolled nicely. There are splits in some of these. They don’t catch on the laces because the laces are pretty hefty and abrasion resistant. But you can see that there are no grommets like pulling out. There’s no damage to the fabric around this. Once again, because this corset is so very short, there really isn’t much opportunity for the bones to work and bend in there and their channels here. So, this remains extremely straight in the back. And that means that it is able to do its job better to reinforce the grommets and prevent them from having uneven tension and pulling out. So, shorter centers corset belts always have that added advantage of the back not working as easily. Very long corsets, long line corsets, high back corsets, over bust corsets will always come with a higher risk of bones more easily warping in the back.

The laces in this corset are your typical workhorse shoelace style lasing, quarter inch wide, black flat, a little bit springy, but definitely don’t break and they don’t catch on the laces. It’s hard to abrade or make them run. And they’re definitely long enough, as you can see here. So, when it’s expanded as far as it’ll go, this lasing gap in the back, is 8.5 inches wide. Once again, like I say in my other reviews, it does not mean that I want you to buy a corset that is like 10 or 12 inches smaller than your natural waist. No way. The modesty panel will only cover a lacing gap of about four inches anyways. But what it means is that there is definitely enough slack in this corset to wrap the corset around yourself easily so that you can get in and out of this corset quickly.

The Gia corset belt by Glamorous Corset is available only in black satin at the moment. And it comes in closed waist sizes, 18 inches all the way up to 40 inches. And this sells for $74 US.

And this concludes my review of Glamorous Corset’s Gia corset belt. I hope you enjoyed this video and you learned something new. If you did, please remember to click that like button down there as it helps support the channel and it helps the algorithm do its magic.

If you own the Gia corset belt, let us know what you think of it in a comment down below. If you commonly use finishing belts with your corseted outfits, let us know how you style your outfits in a comment down below as well. I’m sure many people would be interested to have some fashion inspiration.

And if you have any comments or questions about this corset, or Glamorous Corset in general, feel free to leave your comment down below. And I’d be happy to get back to you and answer your questions.

Subscribe if you’d like to see more reviews in the future. And hit the notification bell so that you’d never miss a feature video. And thank you so much for watching all the way to the end of this video. I will see you next time. Bye.

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