Today’s Ernest Leoty channels the singularly innovative and artisanal spirit of its namesake, whose trailblazing 19th-century designs now form part of the fashion collections displayed inside the world’s leading museums, including London’s V&A and New York’s Metropolitan. Set on the French capital’s prestigious Place de la Madeleine, Maison Leoty was one of the premier fashion houses of the Belle Époque, celebrated among fashion’s cognoscenti for its ingenious corset designs.Monsieur Leoty audaciously broke all the rules in corset construction, rejecting the restricting, rigid models of his era, and instead opting for original, curved silhouettes that incorporated the latest breakthroughs in materials, craft and lacing to create lightweight, contour-flattering constructions that allowed for elasticity and stretch for the first time, offering an incomparable flexibility and facilitating the body’s movement, instead of impeding it.