Few women have ever been satisfied with their figures. Hence the foundation-garment industry. Perhaps its peak was the late nineteenth century, when the fashionable Victorian young lady seems to have carried nearly as much rigging as a sailing ship.

Since then, elasticated undergarments have grown simpler and less fashionable. Modern women are urged to perfect their figures by diet and exercise. This state of affairs is not an improvement — elastic at least worked. So Daedalus is studying the basics of the technology.

Tensioned clothing cannot truly shape; it can only squeeze. The natural resulting cross-sections are circles or arcs of circles. The human figure, however, tends to have elliptical or ovoid cross-sections. To impose such shapes, a garment needs not tightness, but directional rigidity.

So DREADCO corsetières are devising fabrics woven, not of fibres which can only carry tension, but of micro-girders which can resist bending. These tiny I-beams have polyimide compression faces, carbon fibre tension faces, and thermoplastic central webs. As with some steel girders, they are initially made in T-section, with a sawtooth vertical web. When two such sections are welded together by their tooth points, the resulting I-beam has diamond-shaped holes along its web. The warp and weft half-girders of the new fabric are laid on a shaped former, the corresponding top half-girders are brought down on them, and all the welds are made at once by a fast-set adhesive. Warp and weft micro-girders thus pass through each other's web holes. They can move angularly against each other, giving the new fabric the soft ‘drape’ of cloth. But it has a definite shape derived from its former; and will impose that shape, subtly but firmly, on the wearer.

Until the complex micro-engineering of production has been optimized, DREADCO's ‘Shapers’ will be vastly expensive. In the fashion trade, fortunately, this is not necessarily a disadvantage, especially for such a revolutionary product. Instead of merely squeezing the wearer at one point and displacing the tissue elsewhere, they will truly shape her figure. Thin and seemingly insubstantial, they will flatten an excessive stomach without cramping the rest of the waist, and will form thighs, buttocks and breasts into pert, becoming contours without even feeling tight. Even if quite overweight, the happy wearer will still display a perfect figure, but slightly scaled up.