Brigman Award Winner: Slim Cognito: Spanx and Shaping the Female Body MAGGIE UNVERZAGT GODDARD “W E ALL WEAR THEM WITH PRIDE,” SAID FIRST LADY Michelle Obama during the White House’s Fashion Education Workshop, a day of seminars for students /Reading

featuring assorted design professionals (“Remarks by the First Lady”). Highlighting the accomplishments of billionaire Spanx founder Sara Blakely in her address, Michelle Obama thus identified herself as another woman who wears Spanx. An American hosiery company founded in 2000, Spanx markets undergarments that shape and smooth the female body.1 Following the Fashion Education Work- shop, articles immediately emerged proclaiming that Michelle Obama “admits she wears Spanx” (Walano). This confession of body binding —by a health icon celebrated for her toned body—evokes Fou- cauldian frameworks of sexuality, visuality, and discipline. By wear- ing Spanx, women confine their curves in order to achieve an idealized thin female body. The practice of wearing Spanx operates as a constitutive act of gender performativity and reveals the inherent construction of naturalized gender categories. The implications of this process highlight the importance of critically examining how contem- porary body-binding practices shape the female body and invite an intersectional lens to view practices of bodily discipline. As a case study in the efficacy of marketing through personal connection, Spanx reveals how female celebrities shape themselves while negotiating the performance of gender conformity—both upholding and unraveling the semiotics of the seamless.

Through the donning of Spanx, women seek to conceal their bod- ies, including minimizing deviant fatness and shaping their flesh to

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conform to expectations of ideal thinness. Wearing Spanx can function as a tactic in cultivating bodily invisibility. According to sociologist Catherine Connell, fashion can operate as both a mode of entrenching race, class, gender, and sexual hierarchies—or as a site of resistance to hegemonic discourses. In her article on the fashion blog Fa(t)shion February, Connell explores how the blog users explicitly privilege fat bodies and make a political statement through their own visualization, thus rejecting the tactics of bodily invisibility promul- gated through Spanx advertisements. According to one blogger, “I look back on myself a year ago, and remember a time when I was ter- rified of my own visibility. . . I remember shoving myself into spanx [sic], adhering to a wardrobe of ‘slimming colors,’ and raging against my own image in the mirror. . . Now I say fuck that. I’ve found my happiness, and I’m not about to hide it” (Connell 213, emphasis orig- inal). When this user resisted her own corporeality, Spanx operated as a way of concealing and minimizing visibility. As Fa(t)shion February demonstrates, however, fashion also offers a mode of communication that challenges hegemonic structures of power that devalue fat bodies and instead affirm the physicality and reality of the body.

While “shoving myself into spanx” suggests an active effort to conform to gender expectations, the undergarment also operates as a way of obscuring the construction of gender norms. Spanx originated to conceal “unflattering” lumps and is currently marketed as a way to “eliminate visible panty lines” (“Shaping Shorts”). The Spanx aes- thetic emphasizes the categories of smoothness and seamlessness, both as a description of the garment’s confining effects on actual bodies and as a mode of rendering gender differentiation a naturalized, seam- less process. The terminology of shaping is reminiscent of Roland Barthes’s 1957 review of the Citro€en DS, in which he emphasizes the smoothness of the car. As he writes, “Smoothness is always an attri- bute of perfection because its opposite reveals a technical and typi- cally human operation of assembling: Christ’s robe was seamless, just as the airships of science-fiction are made of unbroken metal” (qtd. in O’Mahony 482). In The Handbook of Fashion Studies, Marie O’Mahony quotes Barthes in order to position seamlessness as a futuristic aesthetic. Barthes also describes “the old mystical dream of the ‘seamless’” in The Fashion System (Barthes 137). Simultaneously exem- plified in Christ’s robe and spaceships, the seamless is both mystical and futuristic—a traditional religious belief and a high-tech, modern

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innovation. As a product ensuring gender conformity through bodily binding, Spanx operates on a traditional level while leveraging inno- vations in manufacturing materials. Spanx also seeks to rebrand the history of body restriction as a feminist development by constructing a progressive and personal narrative about its female founder.

Spanx emerged from a long history of body restriction products that use technological innovation to emphasize smoothness. These foundation garments work to conceal mechanisms of body sculpting so that they do not show through outerwear. The history of such gar- ments reveals how relations of power and gender differentiation have mapped onto bodies via women’s vestments. The corset, worn by women since the late Renaissance, for example, “was an essential ele- ment of fashionable dress for about 400 years” (Steele 1). However, the corset has also been widely reviled as an “instrument of torture,” whose users often experienced organ compression and limitations in lung capacity (Steele 1). In the 1920s, the girdle and bra largely replaced the corset, but shaped silhouettes never ceased. In February 1947, French fashion designer Christian Dior debuted the New Look, which emphasized rounded shoulders, a long and full skirt, and a cinched waist—thus generating “the revival of fashionable corsetry” (Fields 257). Along with Dior’s New Look, the Merry Widow corset, introduced in 1952, signaled “the widespread interest in corsets as sexual fashion objects after the war” (Fields 267). As Jill Fields notes in An Intimate Affair: Women, Lingerie, and Sexuality, the Merry Widow corset “was both a nostalgic throwback and an up-to-date means of eroticizing the female body via restriction” (Fields 267). Much like Spanx, the corset thus emblematized the polysemy of the seamless—a combination of tradition and innovation that conceals the construction of gender differentiation while rendering the body smooth and seemingly seamless.

Like other foundation garments, Spanx has benefited from the technological innovation of synthetic materials that variously ensure comfort, support, and durability. In October 1938, DuPont announced the discovery of a new synthetic yarn called nylon, and later, in 1958, also developed Lycra, which they put into production in 1960 (Fontanel 110). Spanx primarily makes their shapewear using synthetic fibers while occasionally adding cotton gussets. Most prod- ucts include a combination of nylon and spandex, Lycra, or elastane. The materials ensure the shaping effect while also allegedly allowing

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a fit that provides stretch and comfort. In addition to assuming the historic legacy of bodily binding, Spanx must also respond to claims for comfort emblematic of the current athleisure trend, which incorporates athletic apparel-like leggings and yoga pants into casual leisurewear. In 2014, the women’s activewear market grew 8 percent to $15.9 billion, compared to the market for women’s shapewear, which fell 3 percent to $678 million (Tabuchi). Shapewear is clearly still a profitable industry, yet its comparative decline illustrates the impetus for Spanx to paradoxically position its product as a way for women to empower themselves. By emphasizing its founder’s narrative as a female success story that potentially elevates other women within a capitalist economy, Spanx frames its product as feminist. The company couples this narrative with “empowering” slogans that seemingly celebrate women’s bodies while still selling a product based on the assumption of their inherent failures.

Historically, companies marketing foundation garments have prof- ited from women hoping to mold their bodies into an ideal form to fit gender norms. While Spanx continues this tradition, the company also uses “feminist” slogans to conflate commercialism with female empowerment, often by emphasizing the upward trajectory of its founder, Sara Blakely. By filtering empowerment through market logics, Spanx demonstrates the complexity of commodifying and con- suming allegedly feminist ideologies. The intimacies of Spanx depend on a paradox: that a product reliant on women’s insecurities allegedly empowers women. Such tensions appear in the relationship between celebrities and Spanx, which celebrities use as a tool to engage with audiences. Celebrities, icons of an idealized female form, invoke Spanx to simultaneously disrupt and perpetuate practices of bodily pleasure and discipline, thus revealing how ideologies immanent in objects of popular culture interpellate the body.

Recognizing consumer demand for comfort and increased discus- sion on fat-shaming, Spanx began inserting message cards into their packaging with “feminist inspiration”—including phrases like “Don’t take yourself or the ‘rules’ too seriously” and “Re-shape the way you get dressed, so you can shape the world!” (Tabuchi). Through these slogans, Spanx frames their products as simultaneously self-effacing and empowering, yet they ignore how their marketing depends on women subscribing to a particular aesthetic that values thin over fat bodies. While circulating these allegedly feminist phrases, their Web

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site also sold swimwear with the tagline, “Make a splash without making waves!” An advertisement for bodysuits proclaimed, “Hide 5 pounds in 5 minutes!” (“SPANX by Sara Blakely,” 27 Apr. 2015). While Spanx leverages language that seemingly celebrates women’s bodies, the company instructs consumers about their bodily flaws in order to sell their products. Within this framework, body acceptance is conditional on the purchase of Spanx.

Spanx combines its allegedly feminist messaging with a carefully produced narrative about their founder, Sara Blakely, to again posi- tion the purchase of their product as an act of female solidarity and feminist success. Its Web site contains a link on the homepage that invites users to click and learn more about their founder. Spanx prominently displays her narrative, “Sara’s Story,” in order to craft its product as a form of female empowerment cleverly coupled with a sense of play. The Spanx Web site has featured a personalized section on its founder since its initial launch in September 2002 (“SPANX by Sara Blakely,” 23 Sep. 2002). The origin story highlights Bla- kely’s ascent to becoming “the world’s youngest self-made female bil- lionaire” (“Sara Blakely Bio”). Frustrated by the way her butt looked in white pants, Blakely cut the feet out of a control top pantyhose and developed an idea for a product that would not roll up her leg. As the current story goes, “With $5000 she saved from selling fax machines door-to-door, she wrote her own patent, begged manufac- turers to make a prototype (everyone thought she was crazy), and cold-called buyers” (“Sara Blakely Bio”). The narrative engages read- ers through its materiality—her white pants, her perfected prototype, and her lucky red backpack, which she wore to her first meeting with Neiman Marcus. Her story invites consumers to identify with her through shared insecurities, self-deprecating humor, and sheer temerity.

As the face of Spanx, Sara Blakely solidifies the constructed con- nection between capitalism and female empowerment. In 2010, she established the Leg Up program. Recognizing the “big break” that Oprah Winfrey facilitated for Blakely by naming Spanx a “Favorite Thing,” according to the program Web site, “We at Spanx want to pay it forward and give other amazing women entrepreneurs their leg up!” (“Giving Women a Leg Up”). The Leg Up prize package includes features in the Spanx catalogue, on the Web site, and via social media, as well as a “Lucky Red Backpack (the same kind Sara

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used to start Spanx) [and the] opportunity to have a private chat with Sara” (“Giving Women a Leg Up”). As Blakely described the pro- gram, “Our goal is to provide women connections and support in order to unleash more of the world’s greatest untapped resource . . . women” (“Sara Shines the Light”). While Leg Up effectively supports women-owned businesses and provides exposure to female entrepre- neurs, the program also filters empowerment through market logics, thus reducing liberation to participation in capitalist systems.

The efficacy of marketing through personal connections also char- acterizes the ways that celebrities use Spanx to craft their own per- sonal brands. As a text for self-fashioning, Spanx allows popular figures to adhere to aesthetic feminine expectations while still negoti- ating such ideologies. Numerous celebrities have publicly shared about their use of Spanx, including Oprah, Kim Kardashian, Katy Perry, and Tyra Banks. Each presents a compelling case study in the ways that individuals relate to their audiences while shaping both a public persona and their physical figure. The relationship between Spanx and humor, as suggested by Sara Blakely, is particularly strik- ing. By revealing the hidden mechanisms that perpetuate the promise of perfection, celebrities like Tina Fey and Wanda Sykes make visible the labor behind the performance of the thin female figure through comedy, thus upholding bodily binding while bonding over its con- structed nature.

On May 7, 2015, on her final appearance on the Late Show with David Letterman, Tina Fey walked on stage in a tight blue and black dress. In the clip, she tells Letterman, “I realized that when you retire, this is it. Like, I’m never gonna wear a fancy dress on a talk show again. First of all, it’s very hard work. I don’t know if you’re aware of the contraptions under here. It’s almost medical” (“Tina Fey Strips Down”). In addition to explaining the intense labor and seem- ingly medical technologies that enable Fey to appear appropriately feminine for a late night talk show, she says that she dresses up “out of respect for [Letterman].” Her remarks evoke notions of gender per- formativity, as articulated by Judith Butler, who defines gender iden- tity as “the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to pro- duce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being” (45). Fey names the cultural demand for female celebrities to repeatedly per- form a specific set of acts, including wearing a formfitting dress and

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Spanx on a nationally televised late night talk show, which coheres to create the constructed notion of gender.

In addition to articulating the performance of gender, Fey also visu- ally embodies its production. As Fey says, “Because this is my last time wearing a fancy dress on a talk show and conforming to gender norms out of respect for you, my gift to you is I want to give you the dress.” She proceeds to remove her dress and make visible the labor behind the performance of the thin female figure. She strips down to her nude bra, thigh-shaper, and black slimming bodysuit, which has “BYE DAVE!” printed across the crotch and “#LastDressEver” covering her buttocks. Fey’s comedy emphasizes the performative energies demanded from female celebrities for public appearances with particu- lar male figures, namely David Letterman. Although her sincerity in demonstrating respect is debatable, her embodiment of female perfor- mance flags entrenched gender inequalities in aesthetic labor.

Fey uses Spanx as a tool to engage with audiences by negotiating the semiological order of fashion. As Roland Barthes writes in The Fashion System, “Fashion thus appears essentially. . . as a system of sig- nifiers” (Barthes 280). Fey displays her Spanx ensemble to signal the constructed nature of female aesthetic labor, yet she simultaneously upholds standards of normative beauty, including the thin ideal. As an intervention in the predominant invisibility of the construction of femininity, Fey acts against the logics of the desire to conceal shaping mechanisms yet simultaneously reinforces an investment in appearing thin. The polysemic Spanx reflects the communicative possibilities of culture and fashion, as described by sociologist Dick Hebdige. In Subculture: The Meaning of Style, Hebdige offers a robust account of culture “as systems of communication, forms of expression and repre- sentation. . . [and] ‘coded exchanges of reciprocal messages’” (129). As a form of communication, the multivalent Spanx operates as the material site of exchanged meanings over the (in)visibility of con- structed feminine identity. Spanx seeks to erase its own construction, yet by literally revealing the mechanisms of female performance, Tina Fey disrupts its seamlessness.

Like Tina Fey, Wanda Sykes couples comedic critique with acknowledging the expectations of feminine aesthetics, but she also highlights the intersectionality of identity in order to critically exam- ine how the specter of whiteness shapes the idealized female body. She addresses Spanx in a routine from I’ma Be Me, her HBO comedy

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special that premiered in October 2009, which she also used as mate- rial on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. Sykes approaches the subject by acknowledging the effects of age on the female body and disclosing that she wears Spanx when on camera. She tells DeGeneres, “I’m not going to lie with you, Ellen, it’s Spanx.” In connecting with her audience, Sykes uses Spanx to demonstrate her down-to-earth honesty and her own bodily flaws. She constructs her relatable persona through a humorous anecdote about the fat in her stomach area, which she named Esther. “Esther is a beast,” she says in I’ma Be Me. “Loves bread and alcohol.” After describing—and bodily enacting— when Esther took the wheel and attempted to drive Sykes to The Cheesecake Factory, Sykes then recounts when she put Esther in Spanx for her appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and her stomach rolled out. By naming and impersonating an “unflattering” body part, Sykes uses the concerns that Spanx elicits for comedic effect.

Sykes’s performance in I’ma Be Me and her appearance on Ellen dif- fer in their endings, which reveal how her black identity informs her performance of gender and respectability. Film and media studies scholar Bambi Haggins explores how black comedians negotiate the skewing and reinforcing of racial stereotypes, including Sykes’s own adopted identity as “BBF, or Black Best Friend” on shows like Curb Your Enthusiasm (Haggins). At the beginning of I’ma Be Me, Sykes interrogates the internalization of racial stereotypes, especially through “the politics of respectability, the black middle-class reaction to the stereotype of the Jezebel and myths about primitive black sex- uality” (Mizejewski 157). In her performance, she recalls, “When I was growing up, my mother wouldn’t even let us dance in the car. We were sitting in the car, and a good song would come on the radio. She would stop the car.” According to Sykes, her mother would ask, “Do you want to dance or do you want a ride? Because you aren’t dancing in my car. White people are looking at you!” Although ini- tially incredulous, Sykes realized that “she was right” and recognized the realities of white surveillance and the demand for bodily com- portment in respectability politics.

Sykes extends the notion of the white gaze into her comedy about her unruly body and Spanx. When she performs her routine on Spanx in I’ma Be Me, Sykes describes looking down and realizing that “Esther is climbing out of the Spanx on national TV. I look down,

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and there’s Esther: ‘Hey, Jay!’ Fuck you, Esther. White people are looking at you!” When recounting the same story on Ellen, Sykes refrains from the final comment of naming the white gaze—yet the camera pans to DeGeneres’s white audience and effectively illustrates the point. Spanx therefore functions as a form of bodily restraint that shapes race and gender, in addition to other intersecting identity cat- egories. Emerging from the Spanx, Esther repudiates respectability politics and ignores the white gaze, as Sykes details how whiteness functions as a restrictive force. As feminist film theorist Linda Mize- jewski writes, “The punch line exposes whiteness as the appraising gaze that disciplines bodies into restrictive shapewear for them to be acceptable. . . And it confirms the white nature of prettiness in the comedy of women who find the conventions of attractiveness funny” (189). Sykes uses Spanx as a tool for crafting her own relatable per- sona but also for detailing the practices of white surveillance that seek to control the black female body.

Both Tina Fey and Wanda Sykes invoke Spanx to disrupt practices of bodily discipline while still engaging in the performance of gender differentiation. Their public discussions of Spanx render visible the construction of the idealized female body and recognize the labor behind aesthetics. While Spanx positions its products as “essentials” for women, Fey and Sykes demonstrate how current fashion necessi- tates hidden mechanisms of bodily restriction in order for “deviant” fat to adhere to thin expectations. Spanx continues its shift toward emphasizing comfort, yet their Web site still features predominantly thin white or light skinned models. While allegedly shifting away from fat shaming, Spanx maintains connections with other intersect- ing hegemonic discourses that mediate its multivalent messages. While providing connections and public exposure to women-owned businesses is one approach to creating more opportunities for certain women to enter capitalist enterprises, the appropriation of feminist messaging falls far short of female empowerment without interrogat- ing broader connections to forms of oppression.

Note

1. Although Spanx has been manufacturing products for men since 2010, including shirts and

underwear, the company primarily targets a female demographic, which is the project of this

paper.

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Maggie Unverzagt Goddard is a PhD student in American Studies and Public Humanities at Brown University.

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