5. the hourglass; As a model, Honor Fraser learned to show off her wasp waist.

Byline: Mark Holgate

Honor Fraser faced a dilemma recently. The onetime model had been invited to a friend's birthday party. Should she, she wondered, lace herself into her Mr. Pearl corset for old times' sake? An incredible construction of boned black satin, it gives her a poitrine not entirely dissimilar to that of Madame X, the woman depicted in John Singer Sargent's portrait of 1884. And yet . . . Fraser's life in L.A. doesn't intersect with those of the trussed-up retro-psychobilly girls of Orange County. A corset could relay the wrong message. "People might think that I want to be in some dark club, whipping someone. . . . Not that I am averse to that," she says, laughing. So Fraser left the corset in one of the drawers of her dressing room at her Marina del Rey home and put on a Gaultier dress instead.

When she modeled in the nineties, Fraser was the one whom designers would go to when they needed to flesh out a dramatic hourglass dress. Her figure was ideal to showcase a look that was all about a heaving bosom, a wasp waist, hips that rolled this way, then that. At an early Alexander McQueen show, she was encased in a purple silk lace corset jacket with a collar that grazed her temples. Vivienne Westwood squeezed her into body-conscious plaid with a deep decollete, an ensemble that suggested Hugh Hefner had set up shop in Brigadoon. "I was always in corsets because of my big boobs," she says. "It was the more extreme designers who wanted to work with me. Not Calvin Klein."

Now the rest of the world is catching up with the Fraser look. One of this fall's key silhouettes is the classic hourglass, though these days it is being toyed with; chicer edges are being added to its Jessica Rabbit proportions. Alexander McQueen, Alber Elbaz for Lanvin, and Tomas Maier for Bottega Veneta have all amplified it by nipping the waist as small as it will go and gently padding the hips to add a fullness into the clothes themselves. Enforced hourglass is the phrase that's being used to describe it.

Fraser's day-to-day life in California doesn't require her to engage with extreme design gestures, however. "The drama of the runway is simply too much drama for L.A.," she says. "Femininity is not portrayed in dramatic terms." (Even the elfin cropped haircut that Chris McMillan gave her recently on a shoot for a Saks Fifth Avenue ad campaign initially gave her pause.)

So she wears clothes that will work at work in her gallery, located on the hip Abbot Kinney stretch of Venice. The space will focus on retrospectives ...