Keira Knightley's Latest Turn in a Corset Is the Scandalous Colette

Kiera Knightley is back in costume for her latest period film Colette, based on the life of French novelist Colette.

Perhaps your immediate response is, “Kiera Knightley? In a costume drama? No way!” And yes, the woman has appeared in more costume dramas than you can shake a stick at—she probably wears 18th Century satin dancing slippers around her house at this point.

But a lot of Knightley’s extremely on-brand period dramas are very good, and Colette is a fascinating figure ripe for the biopic treatment. Her early works were a runaway success in Belle Époque Paris but written under her husband’s name, so that he reaped the financial rewards. Her affairs—including one “with a niece of Napoleon III, the Marquise de Belboeuf, known as ‘Missy,’ with whom she began her music hall career in a sketch miming copulation (it caused a riot at the Moulin Rouge),” according to the New York Times—were the stuff of legend. The woman covered an incredible amount of ground and lived long enough to see the stage adaptation of her novel Gigi launch the career of Audrey Hepburn.

Also, that particular style of hat looks good on Keira and almost nobody else and she should take advantage of it whenever possible.