More than a decade ago, Petra Collins, a defining millennial photographer whose pastel-colored and unretouched work focuses on the female body, had her Instagram account deleted after posting a photo that revealed her pubic hair. The image is of Collins’ own body, navel to mid-thigh, over a tinsel backdrop. She is wearing full coverage cotton briefs, pubic hair just slightly visible over the elastic waistband.
Collins wrote a response to being censored, posing a rhetorical question: “To those who reported me, to those who are disgusted by my body, to those who commented ‘horrible’ or ‘disgusting’ on an image of ME, I want you to thoughtfully dissect your own reaction to these things, please think about WHY you felt this way, WHY this image was so shocking, WHY you have no tolerance for it. Hopefully you will come to understand that it might not be you thinking these things but society telling you how to think.”
Years later, the same visibility that got Collins banned on social media is now being sold back to women on the internet — as lingerie. Earlier this week, Kim Kardashian’s fast fashion brand Skims released a line of thong underwear adorned with faux pubic hair. Available in 12 shades and textures and selling for $32 each, the “Faux Hair Micro String Thong” is currently sold out.
But Kardashian is not joining the ranks of Collins or other feminist voices. She is not taking up the Sisyphean task of fighting to normalize natural bodies, including body hair. Rather, Kardashian’s newest line of faux pubic hair underwear is the latest example of how lucrative the commodification of women’s bodies can be.
Much has been made, including by me, of how bodies, particularly women’s bodies, have become little more than an extension of our artificially accelerated trend cycle. In the 2010s, Kardashian and her famous sisters helped usher in “the BBL era”: the popularization of an impossibly curvaceous body. According to the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, the number of notoriously dangerous butt enhancing surgeries grew 77.6% between 2015 and 2021, coinciding with the Kardashians’ rise to pop culture dominance, and dominance over women’s beauty standards. More recently, that particular body modification trend has slowed, and another has replaced it: In conjunction with the increased popularity of GLP-1 medications like Ozempic and the categoric rejection of the body positivity movement, super skinny is, once again, the body du jour. Here, too, the Kardashians are at the helm, with rumors of them, along with other celebrities, reversing or reducing previous procedures to slim down and comply with yet another impossible beauty standard.
And pubic hair itself has been subject to its own trend cycle. Largely dictated by the adult film industry, the so-called 1970s “bush” has been replaced in decades since by waxed and, more recently, lasered bare vulvas. If you think this is a matter of personal preference or, God help you, hygiene, I urge you to consider the feminist maxim, popularized by Carol Hanisch’s 1969 essay: “the personal is political.” Genitalia without pubic hair is often described as “clean,” with the misogynistic implication, of course, that womanhood is dirty. There is also an overt societal correlation between hairlessness and purity and youth, one that historically exists across cultures.
Pubic hair has often been used in fashion to either send a feminist message or subvert one. There was the famous 1994 Vivienne Westwood fashion show during Paris Fashion Week, where Carla Bruni wore a faux fur coat and a matching merkin underneath. Last year, Maison Margiela, designed by John Galliano, sent models down the runway in sheer, Victorian-inspired gowns and visible merkins made with real human hair embroidered onto silk tulle.
Immortalized by a particularly memorable episode of “Sex and the City,” the Brazilian wax was popularized in the late 1980s by the seven J. Sisters’ salon in midtown Manhattan. Laser hair removal, a popular, more permanent and less painful option than waxing, is an industry poised to surpass $1.46 billion by 2031, according to Yahoo Finance. The Kardashians, too, were often filmed discussing their own hair removal techniques, including waxing, on their former reality TV show “Keeping Up With the Kardashians.” I’m willing to bet that the Main Street in your own hometown has one or two chain laser and waxing studios, vying for young women’s time and money.
Kardashian has found her greatest success in a kind of economic-cum-cultural gray area: the plausible deniability granted by sex-positivity and sexual freedom to cynically monetize sex and shock. Let’s be clear: If these items were sold by anyone else, not only would they not have sold out, but they would have very likely been met with ridicule or even disgust.
Kardashian is a master marketer and saleswoman. To chalk up this product to rage bait marketing (a take I’ve seen all over the internet, something akin to Sydney Sweeney’s notorious denim campaign) is both reductive and suggests a misunderstanding of Kardashian’s particular brand of business savvy. Her lucrative career and enduring fame have hinged upon three things: an acute awareness of just how well sex and sex-adjacent products sell, the power of shock, and when to capitalize on an emerging trend.
The new line of Skims underwear is the embodiment of that marketing ideology: a sanitized and profitable version of Margiela’s fashion provocation, and the well-timed reversal of an enduring trend that has already begun to emerge in fashion.
It is truly a stunning example of the ouroboros of capitalism. Consider an entire generation of women, given virtually no other societal option than to eliminate their pubic hair since puberty, now subject to the changing tides of capitalism again. Get out your credit card, you have something else to buy: your pubic hair back.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
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