‘Compression not suppression’: fashion’s growing addiction to shapewear
Shapewear, with all its sucking, tucking witchcraft, has been a part of my wardrobe since I was 14. Family weddings, birthday parties, leavers’ prom – you name it. Whether I actually needed it is, of course, up for debate. And yet the confidence that came with that first pair from M&S, bought with guidance (though not insistence) from my mother, convinced me to keep wriggling into them long before anyone came up with the idea that shapewear didn’t need to be ugly or – worse – uncomfortable. Back then, it was both – but somehow it made mefeel more comfortable with my blossoming frame.
Now, I wear it on a weekly basis. When I’m shopping for a dress, I’ll even pick something with the understanding that shapewear will help “finesse” things. And by that, I mean smoothing – not sucking, or making me smaller. Instead, the idea is to even out lumps and bumps to offer up a more “precise” silhouette.
It’s not just me. Charlotte’s Spanx appear in the new season of And Just Like That… And though much was written about Shiv Roy’s Succession “stealth wealth” wardrobe, I was more interested in the taupe body that she wore in the final season, like a badge of honour.
Skims, which is described by Kardashian as “solutionwear” – and was recently valued at $4bn – shows no signs of slowing down. “Our goal was to challenge the outdated conventions of wearing shapewear to slim [the body],” says Jens Grede, the CEO and co-founder of Skims. “It was also with the intention of reinvigorating a tired industry.”
Translated, that seems to mean that people who wouldn’t have worn shapewear 10 years ago are much more open to it. Celebrity stylist, Elizabeth Saltzman – who works with Gwyneth Paltrow and Julianne Moore – says she uses it on the red carpet “for comfort, confidence and ease, not for body contouring”. She adds: “[Today] shapewear has been normalised.”
Still, all this begs the question: why do we continue to need solutions to a problem that simply shouldn’t need solving in 2023? Do women’s bodies need refinement to be palatable – and is it normal to want that on a daily basis?
Much of this pressure has arguably come from Kardashian herself, whose influence is such that her body has become a trend in itself. Some women have been known to resort to extreme measures to create a silhouette that Skims alone could never achieve. (Moreover, she and her family have also been accused of appropriating Black or racially ambiguous features over the years.)
Still, the fact that the market continues to grow is curious, something I’d also put down to some clever messaging. Indeed, from Heist to Skims to even M&S’s new shapewear, they now come packaged with sentiments of confidence and empowerment.
Heist describes its “revolutionary” shapewear as “compression not suppression”, while Marks & Spencer now has 94 shapewear items available on its website. Soozie Jenkinson, head of lingerie design says its anti-chafe shorts offer “a smoothing silhouette which clothes glide over” as well as preventing that inner-thigh discomfort many will be familiar with.
There is also a growing trend for size inclusivity. M&S go up to a size UK 24, while Skims and Spanx offer products up to a 30. Most brands also come in multiple colours to suit different skin tones.
Wearing shapewear does still come with an uneasiness, however. Smoothing, even without a message of shrinking, is a questionable practice. Not only does it change your body, it also offers an appearance few of us naturally have.
Is this autonomy or simply oppression: does wearing a shoulder-to-knee compression garment make me feel constricted, or is it a choice I make to walk a little taller, and feel better about my size 14 frame?
For me, it’s the latter, though I sometimes still wonder why I feel the need to falsify what lies beneath. At my best friend’s hen do, I wore Skims pants underneath a sleek, sheer sequin gown from 16Arlington, that emulated the underwear style worn by Paloma Elsesser on the catwalk. Could I have worn the dress without them? Of course. Would I have? Probably not.
And for all my love of shapewear, there are moments (usually at the end of the night when I’m pulling myself out of it) when I wish I didn’t feel the need to wear it; that I could feel comfortable enough to prove a little chub
bier here, a little less svelte there. That I didn’t feel the need to hide this very normal body – and that I could prove more confident, more chill with my natural shape than I am. The standards that women are up against – particularly in this Ozempic era – aren’t going to change because I, or my contemporaries, choose to wear an item that makes them feel better about themselves.
Of course shapewear will always pull us back to the days of corsets, which feels particularly depressing when set within the landscape of post-girlboss feminism. But even then, corsets weren’t always about “skinnyfying”. Polly Putnam, curator of collections at Historic Royal Palaces, views it within a more historical context. “In the 18th century, corsetry had more in common with a pair of Skims,” Putnam says. “It wasn’t about making someone teeny-tiny, it was about making sure they were tidy. The aim was to create a neat shape and a neat foundation for which to wear the glorious fabrics.”
Recently, a friend who was getting married this summer asked me if shapewear was worth it. I’ve known her since the start of secondary school and so understand that she’s someone who places a premium on comfort, but who has also always been below a size 8 and who, until now, likely never felt the need to wear something like that. Shapewear is a lot better now – but there’s still a restrictive element that takes getting used to. So, I told her to think about it – and in the end she opted against it.
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chemical substances whose structures or sub-structures resemble, at least in part” more thoroughly studied PFAS compounds, like PFOS and PFOA.
But public health advocates warn that all PFAS are persistent in the environment and all that have been studied are toxic, and for those reasons many are calling on the government to largely restrict the entire chemical class.
Speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal, a current EPA employee in the toxics office said the chemical’s definition has been evolving for several years. The employee said they first learned of the latest change in public comments made by Michal Freedhoff, a Biden-appointed toxics office administrator.
It is unclear what prompted the latest shift, the employee said, but it comes as the EPA implements its “PFAS strategic roadmap” to help rein in PFAS pollution. The shifting definition complicates that effort, the employee said.
“EPA can’t get its act together on what PFAS are,” they added. “To regulate PFAS, you have to agree what are and are not PFAS.”
The most widely used, inclusive definition, and that proposed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), defines any chemical with one fluorinated carbon atom as a PFAS. That could include tens of thousands of chemicals on the market and some public health advocates say a narrower definition is warranted.
The EPA toxics office in 2021 implemented a “working definition” that defined PFAS as chemicals that have “at least two adjacent carbon atoms, where one carbon is fully fluorinated and the other is at least partially fluorinated”.
It covered about 6,500 PFAS, but the toxics office expanded the definition as the industry exploited loopholes.
The employee said debating the definition distracts from the more important effort to quickly regulate PFAS that are already known to be found in people and animals.
Current and former EPA employees say the agency is not defining some fluorinated chemicals used in pesticides as PFAS at a time when research has discovered their widespread use in agricultural products. The agency also excludes some “ultra short chain” PFAS refrigerants, which are defined as PFAS by the European Union but not the toxics office, said Tim Whitehouse, a former EPA attorney now with the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility nonprofit.
He said the stricter regulations in Europe have forced the industry away from the kind of PFAS refrigerants produced by Chemours, a chemical manufacturer with a plant in North Carolina. Chemours opposes defining the refrigerants as PFAS “because it is going to destroy their market” as it has in Europe, Whitehouse added.
The consequences of the EPA’s narrower definition have already been felt in North Carolina’s Cape Fear basin, which is contending with decades of Chemours pollution. A 2019 citizen group petition asked the EPA to conduct studies that would shed light on the health impacts of 54 PFAS compounds found in human blood and water in the region.
In the agency’s December 2021 response, it declined to test for 15 chemicals it said “do not meet” the toxics office PFAS definition.
The change also creates uncertainty for chemical companies who are producing substances that may or may not fall within the definition, which Kyla Bennett, a former EPA official now with PEER, characterized as “insanely frustrating”.
“The EPA claims they switched to a case-by-case basis to remain flexible, but in the past it has said, ‘We want to provide regulatory certainty,’ but this is the furthest from regulatory certainty that I can think of,” she added.
The White House’s Office of Science and Technology coordinates among federal agencies could provide guidance to federal agencies on which definition to use, but it has failed to do so, Bennett said.
“The bottom line is the EPA has one job and that is to protect human health and the environment, and when it comes to PFAS they are not,” she added.