Underneath it all, she is 100% Lizzo
The many, many people who have applauded, criticized and otherwise taken part in what often seems like an endless discussion around Lizzo’s naked form may be surprised to learn that she does not spend quite as much time undressed as they may think.
“Sometimes when I look at the internet, I have an identity crisis because I’m like, ‘Wait, who do these people think I am?’ ” Lizzo (birth name, Melissa Jefferson) said recently via Zoom from her home in Los Angeles. “Right now I think people just think I’m naked all the time,” she said.
But actually she has spent a good chunk of her time in the last three years not just on her upcoming album or her new Amazon Prime reality show, “Watch Out for the Big Grrrls,” but also on an entirely different project. One that involves putting stuff on, rather than taking it off.
It is, she teased recently on social media, “the biggest thing yet. Bigger than anything I’ve ever done.” It may also be the most controversial.
Because Lizzo, champion of unfettered flesh, is making shapewear.
You know, the type of underwear that traditionally has seemed the opposite of the message about loving yourself as you are, contained in such Lizzo songs as “Juice” and “Truth Hurts.” Not to mention her TV show.
Which is why she wants to be clear: She isn’t trying to change other people’s bodies. She’s trying to change the essence of shapewear itself.
The line is called Yitty, after her childhood nickname, and it was created with Fabletics Inc., parent company of Fabletics. There will be about 100 different pieces divided into three collections: Nearly Naked, Mesh Me and Major Label.
Together, Lizzo said, they will “give everyone the opportunity to speak for themselves when it comes to how their body should look and how they should feel in their body.”
A brief shapewear history of shapewear
“Shapewear” is a relatively new name for a very old concept — that is, that a woman’s body should be altered via external means to make it more acceptable to the eyes of various beholders, most of them men. If that involved pain … well, such was the price of achieving society’s definition of beauty.
What forms the alterations take have varied according to cultural norms; references to girdles can be found as far back as the “Iliad.” Panniers, those underskirt structures that exaggerated hips, were a 16th-century version of shapewear; so were steel or whalebone and canvas corsets. Come the mid-20th century, elasticated girdles were in vogue, which in turn gave way to pantyhose, which evolved, in 2000, into Spanx, which is what made shapewear modernday famous.
Lots of new players have entered the market, most notably, Yummie Tummie, founded in 2008 (and now rebranded as Yummie); Honeylove, created in 2016; and, above all, Skims, the Kim Kardashian brand, introduced in 2019, trumpeting comfort and a variety of skin color tones. Allied Market Research recently issued a report predicting the global compression and shapewear market would be worth $6.95 billion by 2030.
A briefer history of Yitty
Though it may seem, in the wake of Fenty and Skims, that Lizzo, 33, is simply jumping on the celebrity shapewear bandwagon, she has actually been thinking about the sector since she was 12.
That, she said, was when she was growing up in Houston and, starting in middle school, learning to be “ashamed of my body.” Later, once she had begun to assert herself musically, she rejected that mindset, and the undergarments that came with it, entirely. And it was only after that, when she finally started to “have fun with my body, creating shapes and allowing my body to be curvaceous, loving the rolls that you’re supposed to hide and exploring through fashion,” that she started to think about shapewear again.
She wanted shapewear that announced itself with pride — and felt like a hug. The kind of shapewear you could wear with nothing on top. She didn’t even want to call it “shapewear.” She wanted to call it “bodywear,” but no one knew what that meant.
Then Kevin Beisler, her manager, told her he had met with the Fabletics team, who had been doing a lot of customer surveys.
Those customers had said that “the No. 1 category they wanted us to start was shapewear,” said Don Ressler, who founded Fabletics Inc., along with Adam Goldenberg.
“They get it,” Beisler told Lizzo.
“Those words alone were so incredible, because I hadn’t heard them,” she said. “Nobody had believed in my wild dream.”
The Lizzo factor
Lizzo does not think the market is saturated or that she missed the boat because there are other brands ahead of her. “There’s nothing like feeling like you’re in the right place at the right time,” she said.
Yitty is “something personal to me, something for the baby version of me,” she continued. “I have been parallel with the body positive movement for a long time, and people have made my name synonymous with it, and I’m always like, body positivity belonged to the people who truly created it — the Black, brown, queer big women, my girls in the 16 plus.” As an indicator of intended audience, the ad campaign features models of all sizes, including Lizzo’s best friend, who is an extra-small, as well as Lizzo herself.
Lizzo is the chief executive and co-founder of Yitty; Kristen Dykstra, former chief marketing officer of Fabletics, is president. The lines took three years to develop and will range from XS to 6X. Prices for leggings are $69.95 to $74.95, and bras will be $49.95 to $59.95. There are two compression weights, antimicrobial fabrics so the shorts and thongs and leggings can be worn without extra underwear, and bras that hold their shape without underwire.
Yitty will be sold on its own website and on the Fabletics website. It will also be sold in shop-inshops in the 76 Fabletics stores. And it will be front and center at Lizzo tours and in her videos and TV shows. As far as she’s concerned, it’s the beginning of her next stage.