£1K THONG? KIM’S STRINGING US ALONG
IT’S OFFICIAL: Kim Kardashian West is the owner of the world’s most powerful posterior. Want stats? Last week, according to Lyst, there was an 88% surge in searches for ‘thongs’ in the 24 hours following her appearance in one in an Instagram picture, ostensibly to promote her make-up line. Obviously. So ( partially) gird your loins: the G-string is a thing again.
Of course, not just any old thong can find its way on to this in-demand derrière. On the contrary, only very special old thongs do. Because old this one is – 21 years to be precise (or, the same age as Kylie Jenner) – having made its debut on the Gucci catwalk back in 1997, when Tom Ford, master of sexually charged turbo glamour, sent an otherwise bare-bummed model down the runway in one.
And while the provenance of Kim’s actual thong remains unknown (was it a Kris cast-off? A vintage find? Has it ever been, gasp, worn before?), one thing’s for sure: for many of us, the sight of Kim’s G-string no doubt triggers a case of Post Traumatic Sartorial Disorder. If you’re a woman of a certain age, you’ll be taken straight back to a time when wearing a thong riding out of your super-low-slung, boot-cut jeans was a veritable rite of passage into sophisticated adulthood. The great irony of the thong is that while the crux of its charm was its supposed invisibility ( in that it banished VPL) the G-string was the most noticeable knicker of all. Patterned or plain, embellished or with ribbons, it didn’t matter; the only rule was to have a flash of whale tail on show. Nobody was safe; yes, it was a Christina Aguilera staple, but Gillian Anderson also wore one out and proud at the 2001 Vanity Fair party. As the ancient proverb goes: if you’re wearing a thong but nobody sees it, are you even wearing a thong at all? Or something like that. Kim’s G-string moment marks the apex in the revival of all things late ’90s/early noughties and her particular penchant for reviving items we thought had been banished for good (see: cycling shorts). More than that, however, perhaps a status thong is the only place to go for the woman who has tried everything. And, yes, this is a status thong: highly collectable, one version of the double- G buckled style was selling for over £1,000 on ebay last week and it’s also part of the Met Museum’s permanent collection.
So, is the thong back anywhere apart from Planet Kardashian? Fans (and they are out there) will argue they never really went away, just undercover. Which, of course, is where they really do belong .