Spanx shape wear
As we celebrate International Women's Day, it seems fitting that a female entrepreneur has made one of the multiple covers of Forbes' annual billionaires list issue. Did I say fitting? Make that squeezed and smoothed to Hollywood perfection, courtesy of Spanx.
Her lump-eliminating empire has made Spanx creator Sara Blakely, 41, the youngest self-made female billionaire, coming in at No. 1,153 out of a total of 1,226 international billionaires.
"I think my story says that, when women are given the chance and the opportunity, that we can achieve a lot. We deliver," Ms. Blakely said on CBS this Morning. "We can make the world a better place, one butt at a time."
And to think it all started because Ms. Blakely, like most women, hated wearing pantyhose, but loved how the control-top made her look in a pair of white pants. She snipped off the feet, rolled up the legs, and eureka – the power girdle was born. In 2000, Oprah Winfrey named the shapewear line as one of her favourite things, with celebrities becoming the products' best billboards.
"They're the first ones that actually have butt indentations, so they don't give you uni-butt!," Brooke Shields raved on the company's website. "It's my dream come true," a snark-free Tina Fey gushed. "It pushes everything in – your ribs, your organs, your freckles," Ellen DeGeneres added.
It was on Ms. DeGeneres's talk show that 2012 Oscar winner Octavia Spencer confessed that she walked the red carpet in not one, but three pairs of Spanx. "It's wonderful because it gives you the illusion of an hourglass with the sand kind of spread out," said the star of The Help, who then acknowledged that the triple layers left her feeling more like a sausage than a starlet.
The market for men's shapewear has yet to fully take off, with guys saying they wear Manx to help with lower back pain.
Ironically, on the same day that the person who reinvented pantyhose made the billionaire list, a new trend is emerging: mantyhose. An Italian hosiery manufacturer is promoting pantyhose for men – not like they've had much success importing the murse to North America.
But it turns out there's a precedent for men in tights. "Cowboys stock up on L'eggs queen size for those days they will actually ride horses instead of drive pick ups," a commentator wrote on New York magazine's The Cut blog, who says they're the perfect solution to saddle rash.
Are you a Spanx fan? Is there a stigma for donning shapewear?