A girdle by any other name...
Women who wouldn’t set foot in a foundation garment will slide shapewear right on
By Melanie Peeples
Naples Daily News, FL
Saturday, May 20, 2006
When 31-year-old Christine Cooke walked into Saks Fifth Avenue just eight days before her wedding she was looking for a little support. Not a girdle, mind you.
“They look like something my grandmother would wear,” she says, thinking of the old-fashioned garment women once upon a time wouldn’t leave the house without wearing.
“My dress is form-fitting,” she explains. She bought it a year-and-a-half ago and says she’s put on a pound or two since then. “I just want something to slim me down a little bit.”
Cooke sallies up to the sales clerk and tells her what she’s looking for: Spanx. She’d heard about Spanx the way most women in the new millennium have, either by watching Oprah or by word of mouth.
“My friend told me about them,” Cooke says. It turns out her friend had recently gotten married and needed a little bit of support herself. Cooke, like a lot of young women these days, wouldn’t dream of buying a girdle — she winced at the very thought of it — but is happy to plunk $34 down for something that looks a lot like pantyhose, but without the feet.
Of course she couldn’t actually wear pantyhose because pantyhose is out. It went out of style around three years ago and with it went the smoothing and firming support every woman alive since 1959 had come to count on.
Not that that’s why women wore pantyhose. They wore pantyhose because their mothers told them to, and it wasn’t until pantyhose faded from their wardrobes that it occurred to many of them that they were going to miss the way nylon compressed their tummies and thighs.
The daughters and granddaughters of feminists who stripped off their girdles to free themselves from what many considered a paternalistic garment of oppression inherited a world devoid of girdles and pantyhose — and not all of them were entirely happy about it.
Enter a new era of the support garment women today prefer to call shapers, seen in almost any lingerie department in the U.S.
“Spanx brought it back,” explains Kellie Jacoby, public relations manager for Naples’ Saks Fifth Avenue. And they make it look good, too. Fun, even.
Don’t worry, we’ve got your butt covered, the colorful packaging promises.
The gateway ‘girdle’
“Spanx marketing is spectacular,” Jacoby declares. With packages showing cartoons of three young, trim, cosmopolitan-looking women on the front — the kind of women who sit around trendy nightclubs, sipping lemon drop martinis and dishing about boyfriends — Spanx doesn’t ask, “How many calories are in that?” It says, “Have another.”
The Spanx product line runs the gamut from the plain footless pantyhose to pantyhose that runs all the way up the midriff to the bra line, to the all-in-one bodysuits that go from the shoulders down to the calves.
And while Jacoby says that for a certain generation of women, girdles (or foundation garments) never went away, Spanx is the product that paved the way for firmer shaping garments, and helped introduce an army of things that look suspiciously like girdles.
“They’re not girdles. They’re called shapewear,” corrects Leeann Zook, manager of the lingerie department at Dillard’s. “The fabrics have changed. They still hold you in but they’re not as tight and restrictive.”
She points to several racks of shapers that look like everything from bike shorts to a one-piece swimsuit, to even a waist cincher, with hooks and eyes in place of the corset laces that Scarlett’s mammy once struggled with to bring the Southern belle’s waist size back to 22 inches, after she’d given birth to Bonnie Blue Butler.
“In the last three years, shapewear has really become a strong part of the intimate wear business,” Zook says, also suggesting it might have something to do with the decline of pantyhose. “The hosiery market has gone downhill,” she says.
And in today’s world of body-hugging fashions, she says women of all ages and shapes are looking for support.
Zook says the white, lacy, spandex garment that looks like a one-piece swimsuit is a big hit with brides. “It smoothes the edges, smoothes the side, takes away those little bumps and makes you into curves.”
It’s one of the more pretty shapers, but there are still a lot of garments promising more firm control that look like granny panties, if not actual girdles. And, yes, Zook says women are buying them.
“It’s like that movie, ‘Bridget Jones’ Diary’” she says, referring to the film in which Renee Zelweger has to choose which undergarment to wear on her date: the small, sexy panties or the large control-top knickers. The small, sexy panties, Bridget reasons, will look best should she find herself in a position where she needs to remove clothes, but she’ll actually look better in her clothes if she goes for the large, granny panties.
She chooses the larger ones and gets the guy, leading women all across the country to take one step closer to the support garment. And, it must be said, the shapers come in all sizes, even small. “Even a small woman will have a figure flaw,” Zook says. One body part that they don’t like.
Name change aside, the question hanging in the air above every rack of girdles/shapers begging to be answered is: Isn’t a generation of young women wiggling into restrictive garments anathema to the very thing their mothers and grandmothers fought for?
“Everything old is new again,” Zook answers, suggesting that the difference, in 2006, is that women are choosing to wear shapers. Nobody’s telling them to.
The girdles hiding in the back
Dillard’s makes it easy for women looking to step into such a garment by stocking shapers right out on the display floor, even the old-fashioned kind. But that’s not true in all the stores, where the less attractive, old-maid aunt to the lacy maillot remains out of clear sight.
Christine Cammas, a French woman who recently bought Femmes Je Vous Aime, a high-end lingerie shop near Third Street, does stock a few panty girdles, but they’re kept in a basket on a lower shelf of the store, away from the sheer bras and sexy bikinis.
She only carries French and Italian lingerie and, when pressed, she puts it as absolutely delicately as she can, that French women don’t like wearing tight things and that not as many French women as Americans, uhm, well, have to battle a weight problem.
For those who do come into her store looking for a little support, she points them toward the French version of the Spanx-like products. “They don’t want their mothers’ (products)” she says.
Likewise, at Saks, the Spanx and swimsuit-looking shapers are in clear view, but women looking for more support have to ask for it. Fit specialist Patti Testa retreats to a back storage room to pull out the garment that most closely resembles the old-fashioned girdle. She says whenever a woman comes into her department describing this kind of support, Testa will gently ask, “Maybe you need a little panty girdle?”
“No, no, no,” they tell her. “Just a little tummy tucker.”
Victoria’s Secret does something similar. Their footless pantyhose is in plain view, as is something called a “Smooth shaper Bralette,” which, according its packaging, “is designed to eliminate bra lines and bulges. A perfect solution for form-fitting tops.”
But if you want something stronger, something more like a corset, the sales associate has to go behind the curtain, so to speak, to get it. Mikaela Wilkerson comes back with a flesh-colored corselet that serves as a bra but extends down to cover the entire torso, all the way to the waist. It’s made of a light foam, and has hook and eye fasteners in the back.
Shannon Brubaker, another sales associate, is stunned, her eyes wide at the sight of it. “Where’d you get that?” the petite 18-year-old asks.
“I need one of those,” she says, thinking of what she wants to wear under a Victorian-style wedding dress with a corset bodice. Because the dress top is so tight, she says she needs something to “even everything out.”
Girdles and even stranger things
In Naples, if it’s support a woman is after (and if she wants to peruse on her own without asking for help), the lingerie department at Macy’s is about as close as it gets to Nirvana. They have the swimsuit-looking garment, the bike shorts, the waist-cincher, even a tummy-control thong that looks exactly like what Sumo wrestlers wear.
There’s also a butt-lifting panty and a pair that looks like an alien shedded its human suit and left its lower half hanging on the rack. It’s like pants, only heavier, composed of thick, dense, nylon and spandex; a bit like a wetsuit, only it stops at the calf.
“They wear them with capris and long pants,” explains Christina Gaffney, an impossibly thin 22-year-old sales associate.
“I sold one yesterday,” she says, and the customer surprised her. “She was very thin and I was wondering ...” Gaffney trails off, without finishing the obvious question of why the woman thought she needed the garment. Gaffney estimates the woman was in her 30s and says she sees all ages shopping for shapers.
On the same rack as the girdle pants is a waist cincher Gaffney says is big with new moms looking to get their shape back. It’s a simple, little garment, around 6 to 9 inches long with hooks and eyes in the back. It’s designed to run from the top of the panty up and squeeze in the waist.
“They kind of look at these,” Gaffney says, pointing to some of the more heavy-duty shapers, “and get scared,” explaining why she thinks new moms choose the more simple waist cincher. It doesn’t hurt that movie star Gwyneth Paltrow has admitted to wearing two girdles after the recent birth of her second child, Moses.
Gaffney tends to view the shapers as a rite of passage, handed down from generation to generation. “My mom will one day wear them,” she says. “And probably I will,” the 5-foot-6-inch, 105-pounder says without hesitation.
“I’m not gonna stay this way, forever,” she says.
But who knows. By that time, Elizabethan iron corsets might be in again. And they’ll probably call them Ironies. (They should.)
http://www.naplesnews.com/news/2006/may/20/girdle_any_other_name/?neapolitan
