The company's catalog proclaims: "Tame your tummy and create an hourglass silhouette with Super Higher Power, our new comfortable yet powerful high-waisted hosiery shaper.... Now, you've got the power!"

CNN: Do powerful women need to tame their unsightly bulges?

It just so happens that Worth's Second Empire silhouette a tightly corseted hourglass with a huge hemisphere of skirt is what women were wearing when a new breed of painters emerged, artists pursuing the truth of the fleeting moment even if it meant crossing moral boundaries or breaking with the norms of pictorial representation.

WSJ: A Rustling Theater of the Self | Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity | Metropolitan Museum of Art | By Laura Jacobs