Kim Kardashian’s new “ultimate butt” shapewear promises the perfect body – by covering your real body in foam and nylon. But when did we take the “sex” out of "sexy"?
Buying lingerie is an incredibly surreal pursuit. Silk, satin, cotton, or lace: the materials you slip between your skin and the world can act as thresholds, becoming invitations to touch and to feeling. Wearing only lingerie is an essentially liminal state, between dressed and undressed, between putting something on and taking it off. It all disappears in a slippery moment: the slick of red, the sheen of scent, the fall of material to the floor. In the rich territory of those few seconds, all manner of fantasies and desires come to fruit.
But not all lingerie is made to be taken off. In a recent video for Skims, her billion-dollar shapewear brand, Kim Kardashian announced the new “ultimate butt” range, which launched in time for Valentine’s Day. “Our Ultimate butt-enhancing solutions will magically make your dream butt appear (no squats required),” reads the marketing copy. In the clip, Kardashian appears as a fairy godmother to a thin, white model, who asks her: “Can’t there just be one thing in life that’s easy?”. Kardashian waves her wand. The model magically gains her dream ass and breasts. “With Skims’ new shapewear, you can get a butt, boob, and curves immediately,” she says. The model is ecstatic, running her hands over her new body (it’s unclear to me which of these words should be in quotation marks – “her”? “new”? “body”?).
This is not the first time Kardashian’s brand has used the word “ultimate”. Tonally, the teaser video is almost an exact replica of the clip Skims released last year for their “ultimate nipple” bra, which featured fake nipples made out of foam “for a perky, braless look that makes a bold statement”. But what is that bold statement? What are these new nipples, this new ass, for?
James Baldwin wrote that sensuality is about presence. “To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does.” In shapewear, the body becomes something more like an absent presence: the foam nipple or the tight spandex negates the flesh, even as it recreates it. In the comments of the “ultimate butt” teaser on Skims’ Instagram, men are asking nauseating questions like: “what happens when she takes her clothes off?”. And I can’t help but wonder the same thing – not because shapewear is a devious feminine scam, but because actually taking your clothes off is so clearly not the point of shapewear. What I find so bizarre and arresting about Kardashian’s mass-produced foam body parts is that they are not remotely about sex. They’re for looking, not feeling. If they are the “ultimate” anything, they are the ultimate denial of the flesh, a modern chastity belt which, like an iron girdle, mimics the shape of the body parts it locks away. Sensuality cannot exist in this lifeless world: imagine kissing a nipple made of nylon and elastane.
In creating Skims, Kim Kardashian has transferred the impulse to suck in your stomach when you’re having sex (an act proven to obstruct orgasm) into a material object. In her world, you don’t “free the nipple”. You create, instead, the Platonic ideal of a nipple. Shapewear makes sense for Kim. She has long operated within the idea that sexiness is about restriction: clothing as enclosure, flesh as mouldable. Her relationship to the body is something that has been played out on the world stage since her sex tape was leaked in 2007. Three years ago, she shrank herself to fit into Marilyn Monroe’s dress at the Met Gala; ten years ago, her ass was breaking the internet on the cover of PAPER Magazine. At this year’s Grammys, her ex-husband was parading the naked body of his (now ex-)wife on the red carpet – which prompted tabloids to remind us that it wasn’t so long ago that he was telling Kardashian that her ‘naked’ Thierry Mugler dress was “too sexy”. I cannot imagine what it is like to be Kim Kardashian, but I know that she is absolutely true to the ideals she sells. She starves her body to fit into a dead woman’s dress. She takes measures more painful and more permanent than a bra or a pair of leggings, which after all, can be slipped on or off. She has built an entire empire upon a very specific view of what it means to have a body.
The uninterrupted success of Skims, which has continued to rise all the way through the body-positive era and into the post-Ozempic age, speaks to the fact that this view of the body is our most culturally pervasive attitude. At Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration in January, Melania Trump wore a stiff broad-brimmed boater hat by Eric Javits, which some commentators on the left suggested was a kind of self-imposed chastity belt, intended to prevent Melania’s husband from kissing her. Kardashian posted the ‘look’ on her Instagram story. I was not surprised that Kim liked Melania's hat. These women share, above all, a body politic: the female form, in public, must always be circumscribed, moulded, exact. There is nothing new about this attitude: in The Female Nude, Lynda Nead writes that “the female body has [always] been regarded as unformed, undifferentiated matter” where “the procedures and conventions of high art are one way of controlling this unruly body and placing it within the securing boundaries of aesthetic discourse.” With its origins in whalebone corsets and heavy bustles, modern shapewear is another.
Trace back Skims’ changing marketing strategy, and you’d have a perfect timeline of our bodily attitudes in the last ten years. In a 2014 interview, Kardashian said: “I grew up when the body to have was the tall, slim, supermodel one, like Cindy Crawford’s. No one looked like me. It’s good to break the mold and recreate one." Her choice of words predates, but also predicts, Skims, a brand which once used the language of body positivity, but now vehemently states that not only is this the new mould – it is the “ultimate” one. A few years ago, Kardashian told Vogue that Skims is “the comfiest underwear that perfectly moulds to your body”. But in a world where people are injecting their stomachs to repress their appetites, no one talks about comfort anymore. It’s not a coincidence that Skims has chosen this moment to launch its “ultimate” collection: as more and more people take Ozempic and lose weight, they’re also losing their asses and breasts. Now, you can choose where you want fat to appear on your body, and peel it off just as easily as you slipped it on. With the “ultimate” range, it’s clear that it is your body that must perfectly mould to Skims, not the other way around.
Skims’ “ultimate” shapewear and Ozempic are perfect, gleaming bedmates. Patients taking Ozempic report that they are not just uninterested in eating: they’re no longer going out and staying late, no longer drinking or dancing or smoking. They’re also losing their sex drives, partly because the drug interacts with dopamine receptors, and partly because it can cause hormone imbalances. Just as shapewear curtails and tightens soft flesh into submission, Ozempic works by creating an endless sense of fullness, of completeness. Its success stems from the idea that a thin body is the only desirable body. And yet: it is the drug that kills desire. The “ultimate butt” and the “ultimate nipples” demand the highest standard of bodily perfection. And yet: it is the body that resists pleasure.
But lingerie has so much potential as a source of erotic creation, sensual dreaming. I’ve never liked Kim’s takes on the ‘naked dress’ – the Mugler, the Marilyn. In the first, she couldn’t breathe; in the second, she couldn’t eat. Package your body tightly enough, and you are free from ever feeling anything at all, including pleasure. My favourite ‘naked dress’ is created in Atonement, when Keira Knightley emerges from the pond in a slip the colour of her skin, clinging to her dripping body. The wet dress – and the way that, after she leaves, James MacAvoy caresses, reverently, the water which once held her body – are more intensely erotic than any nudity or bodily contact. The electric charge of the scene is that the clothes and gestures invite the body, rather than deny its existence. Simone de Beauvoir wrote about feminine fashion as something that “disguises, deforms, or moulds the body,” and which “in any case… delivers it to view”. But in this moment, flesh becomes visible, unformed, unmoulded, and claims a physical presence in the world, opening the self to a subjective experience of pleasure.
Because flesh moves. When bodies come together, there are folds and dips and ripples. And desire is hungry. This movement and this hunger, the way they root you in your body and in the moment, are the driving narrative forces of sex. Baldwin writes that “something very sinister happens to the people of a country when they begin to distrust their own reactions as deeply as they do here, and become as joyless as they have become.” It has been pointed out multiple times that Kardashian’s empire is built upon a construction of whiteness which borrows parts of Black female bodies without ever centering them as subjective entities. There is something inherently numbing in this process: Baldwin connects the resulting attitudes specifically to the emotional state of white Americans. To reject sensuality, he points out, is to prevent empathy.
The failure of Skims to create anything remotely sexy is made more apparent by the ways in which lingerie can not only enhance, but actually create opportunities for truly embodied fantasies, dreams, passions. bell hooks begins her essay on “Women Artists: The Creative Process” with an image of herself as “a girl who dreams of leisure… a girl for fibres”, “stretched out, wearing silks, satins, and cashmeres”, “adorned… for the awesome task of just lingering, spending uninterrupted time with my thoughts, dreams, and intense yearnings”. In her language, hooks reminds me of the connections, not etymological but emotional, between “lingerie” and “lingering” and “leisure”. She’s talking about the artistic process, but sex is also – or should be – a creative act. It requires presence – in the moment and in your body. You can’t have sex in your Skims, not because you are literally clothed, but because shapewear rewrites your body language, removing you from the narrative of your own sensual experience.
When Kim waves her wand, we’re meant to imagine that she is granting a wish. But her only magic is in removing, denying, circumscribing. What I want, what I am seeking out, is not lingerie as a disappearing act, but as a conjuring. A creative ritual, a manifestation of your desires. The best lingerie should feel like spraying perfume in the places you wish to be kissed. 🌀
Ismene Ormonde is a culture writer and essayist based in London, with words in The Guardian, Observer, Byline, amongst others. She writes about the pursuit of pleasure on her Substack.