Cathie Jung has long been a phenomenon of International proportion, though. of course, her fame emanates from what is most diminutive about her. That is her 15-inch, corset cinched waist.
Undeniably, at age 67, Jung has ballooned into this region’s No. 1 world wide celebrity.
Who among us – she lives with her husband, Robert, a retired orthopaedic surgeon, at Clipper Point in Old Mystic – can boast of a namesake Web site receiving some 1.3million hits a month?
That’s what cathiejung.com logged in July. Since the Web site was created last October by a Dutch banker; the site has recorded more than nine million hits.
For Jung, the mother of three grown children who has worn a corset 23 hours a day – waist training is what she calls it – since 1983, the celebrity is not exactly uninvited, but neither, she says, is it something she’s exploited.
The banker, a friend of the Jungs who owns a shop in Amsterdam, J.C. Creations that specializes in corsets and costumes,(Web site J.C. Creations) put up the Web site on his own. The site offers multiple galleries of photos of Jung in a variety of corsets and, naturally, stages of dress and undress. However, there is nothing especially revealing or shocking, other than a floral tattoo on a right posterior cheek and the star attraction, a waist the size of a New York bagel.
There are also pictures of the Jungs together at wasp-waist balls in Europe and this country. Robert Jung wears a corset for those occasions, when the couple dresses up in Victorian fashion.
Several years ago, when a camera crew from Guinness World Records came to Mystic to film sequences of the Jungs in their Victorian garb as they strolled through downtown, I wrote about her and what had by then become her legend. She was known internationally as the Queen of Corsets. She was featured on Web sites. On rare occasions, she would squeeze into a seven-pound sterling silver “corset cover” worn like a spectacular ornament over a black gown. Her image adorned the pages of Life magazine and The New York Times Style section.

Cathie the corset 'queen'.

At the time, she told me her uncorseted waist was 21 inches, down from 2l or 28 inches when she began her “training.” Then, as now, she and her husband insisted that she under went no surgical enhancement, such as the removal of ribs, to winnow her waist.
I spoke with the Jungs again last week because of a Wall Street Journal story, prompted by Teresa Heinz Kerry’s outfit with a nipped-in waist that she wore at the Democratic National Convention. The story chronicled the fashion rage now in narrowing waists, and the popularity in cosmetic surgery that involves ”removing excess belly fat and then cinching in the waist muscles so the skin curves into an hourglass.”
The cost, at least in Beverly Hills, is $ 7,000 to $ 10,000 for the surgery. The Journal story cautioned that the fad does not signal the return of the corset. One stylist admonished that pulling a belt too tight can make someone “look like an unappetizing sausage linked in the middle.”
To Cathie Jung, who says her health is fine, the dainty waist is a thing of beauty and a way of life, albeit one that requires a rather stoic, if not obsessive, embrace of discipline. To her husband, it’s just another turn in the fashion cycle. “People have become more aware in the last five years,” he said. “It usually starts in high fashion and spreads out all over.”
Fashions, as he suggests, have their moment and then the industry moves on to another consumer-targeted cut. But what continues to spread out all over, feasting on the compression of what has reigned as the world’s smallest waist, is the unrivalled celebrity of Old Mystic’s own Cathie Jung.

This is the opinion of Steven Slosberg.