Disturbing images show shocking effect wearing something like Kim Kardashian’s dress can have on body

Last night saw a plethora of decadently dressed celebrities descend on New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art for the Met Gala.

The theme for the event was 'Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion' with a dress code of 'The Garden of Time,' inspired by a dystopian story by JG Ballard, which sees the rich shelter in a garden as a crowd of the poor and needy draw ever closer.

Outfits from the annual event often go viral on social media, but Kim Kardashian's look from last night has left a lot of people online worried.

People are worried about Kim Kardashian's Met Gala outfit (Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images)

She wore a custom Margiela by John Galliano dress featuring a strapless silver corset and fitted floor-length silhouette made from a delicate silver leaf mesh.

She topped the look off with a grey shrug-style cardigan.

But, while thousands of fans of the reality TV star often try to copy her day-to-day style, very few envied her extravagant look.

Following the event, people flocked to social media to pass comment on the corset Kardashian was wearing, which made her waist so small you might wonder if there was space for her vital organs.

The star's tightly laced corset left social media feeling pretty uncomfortable (Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images)

One person wrote that her tiny waist made them feel 'uncomfortable,' while another said the outfit is 'actually concerning.'

Kardashian's outfit raised a lot of health concerns and for good reason.

In the Victorian era, the pursuit of the hourglass figure led to women being so tightly laced into their corsets that they would suffer serious internal injuries.

In a 1890 article in The Lancet, one of the world's oldest medical journals, a doctor stated that the consequences of corseting 'cannot be but hurtful.'

Over a long period of time, some women's ribcages became deformed, their digestive tracts suffered and their back muscles atrophied through disuse.

Rebecca Gibson, an anthropologist at American University, has investigated the effects of corsets on the skeleton by studying remains dating back to 1700-1900 AD.

Research shows that the regular wearing of corsets led to deformities of the ribs and spine (Museum of London)

She measured the width of their rib cages, the angle at which the ribs meet the spine, and the angle of deviation of the vertebrae.

Of the ten skeletons Gibson examined, every one had deformed ribs pushed into an 'S' shape and vertebral spins misaligned from the typical vertical position.

She says this is 'consistent with long-term pressure on growing ribs and vertebrae and inconsistent with other types of documented damage such as rickets.'

The ribcage of a lifelong corseting woman (Royal College of Surgeons)

A further skeleton shows unnatural compression of the ribs, which leads to reduced lung capacity, as well as constriction to the pelvis.

And, using more than a dozen historical corsets from London's Victoria and Albert Museum, it has been determined that the average adult woman's waist was just 56 cm in circumference.

In comparison, data reported by The Telegraph shows the average British woman now has a waist size of 35 inches.

With that in mind, let's hope Kim's corseted ensemble was a one-off.