Kardashian curves: M&S launches £28 bodysuit with exaggerated hip padding

For decades shapewear has been used to compress and cinch. But now there is a sub-genre emerging. Rather than shrinking a silhouette, it aims to add inches.This week M&S launched a bodysuit that features exaggerated padding at the hip allowing the wearer to create an hourglass shape, or at least the illusion of one.Similar to how bra inserts, AKA chicken fillets, are used to add extra volume to breasts, the £28 “hip boost” features pockets on each side of the suit that allow the wearer to add in enhancing pads.Charlotte Davies, the director of lingerie at the retailer, says the idea stemmed from customer interest in “solutions that offer subtle enhancement alongside everyday comfort and confidence”, with the trend being driven by the catwalks and celebrities. The hip booster’s predecessors at M&S include padded bum shorts “to give the wearer a curvy, contoured look” and stick-on nipples for “a realistic raised profile beneath clothing”.Kim Kardashian’s shapewear brand, Skims, launched shorts with hip padding last year. Many users online claim such type of strategic padding can help minimise “hip dips” – a phrase used to describe the natural inward curves between the hipbone and thigh bone.The emergence of enhancing shapewear comes at a time when both the body and the idea of what a body can look like are increasingly scrutinised. From the widespread use of GLP-1 drugs to a rise in cosmetic surgery procedures, bodies have never been more malleable.On the recent catwalks, designers have been playing with this idea of reconstruction too, coinciding with a return of ultra-thin models. At Schiaparelli, its creative director Daniel Roseberry used both visible and invisible padding to inflate hips and whittle waists. Meanwhile, Dior and Alaïa turned to panniers, rigid side hoop undergarments originally worn by women in the 17th and 18th century, to inspire modern-day dresses with hips similarly wide enough to force the wearer to turn sideways when passing through a door.“Weight-loss medications have changed many bodies dramatically, but they don’t automatically deliver conventional, ideal beauty, which in the current era is quite hard to achieve,” says Victoria Pitts-Taylor, a professor at Wesleyan University and the author of Surgery Junkies: Wellness and Pathology in Cosmetic Culture. “To be very thin in some areas of the body and thick in others often requires building and sculpting, which can happen in a dressing room with fabric or an operating room with scalpels.”This trompe d’oeil effect is also dominating the red carpet. Four years after Kim Kardashian wore a sauna suit to lose enough weight to squeeze into Marilyn Monroe’s dress, she and her hypercurves are back. At the body-themed Met Gala in May, she emphasised her shape with a fibreglass breast plate. Meanwhile, her sisters Kylie and Kendall Jenner opted for moulded corsets with fake nipples and amplified hips. Tulip-like silhouettes have also been embraced by the singers Rosalía and Teyana Taylor and more are expected at the Venice film festival that has just got under way.Ali Bodley, a heritage specialist who curated the Shaping The Body exhibition at York Castle Museum, says everyone from the Tudors including Queen Elizabeth I to the Georgians and the Victorians played with their proportions. Long before Kardashian’s Skims empire, there were “bum shops” – stores specialising in padding.Susie Orbach describes the trend as “grotesque”. The psychotherapist, psychoanalyst and social critic says it puts women in a “position where they are constantly having to create a body”.Pitts-Taylor says the lives of celebrities in the 20th century were generally understood to be aspirational rather than attainable. However, “today consumer culture and social media put pressure on people in everyday walks of life to be image-minded”, she says. “The beauty ideal seems to promise belonging, being valued and successful, in a world in which actual, material equality is increasingly hard to achieve.”Orbach says there is no such thing as “an ideal body shape” explaining the parameters are always shifting. “There is always some type of body shape being promoted. But as soon as you get there, it is wrong.” Rather than “living and being allowed to have safety in our bodies”, she adds, “we are now always in a process of transformation.”