Spanx a lot!
Buying pantyhose during the new girdle revolution can be a pain in the assets
By Karolann Bergman 12/24/2008
The store was well lit, well organized and well known. I don’t want to namedrop, so let’s say I was standing in the hosiery aisle at the local branch of “Bull’s-eye,” my favorite multipurpose shopping stop. I could and have spent hours in the place, perusing nonsense I didn’t need while ostensibly shopping for toilet paper and laundry detergent, but that is a whole other story. That day, I had a mission.
I needed one pair of standard issue black pantyhose.
As I pulled into the crowded parking lot, I reminded myself that I needed to be in and out. I was to show no mercy, walk in, find the pantyhose, pay and escape. There was to be no funny business, no new sweatpants and definitely no sale DVD’s. I didn’t need a shopping list because I had one item to go for.
I thought it would all be so easy. Boy, was I ever wrong!
Forty-five minutes later I found myself still crouched in front of the hosiery display with my eyes blurry and practically crossed from the sea of options laid out before me. I was beginning to lose hope. Low-rise, calf-high, thigh-high, opaque, sheer to waist, footless, stirrup, seams, stripes and fishnets — all available in a series of shades, including such favorites as off-black and semi-nude. Not to mention the height- and weight-based alphabetical sizing chart that landed me somewhere in the no-man’s-land between sizes.
Choosing to ignore my size problems, I opted to pick a color first and decided on the seemingly simple jet-black. I bypassed the aisle packed with tights and leggings and found the display of good old-fashioned hose — the inexpensive ones that used to come in an egg that are now housed in a cardboard mini-box. It seemed like my quest was coming to an end. Ten minutes of digging through rows of dusty boxes later, I had found nothing even remotely near my size. I was about to give up and buy a can of spray paint, thinking I could paint my legs, fool my employer into believing I was wearing hose for a week or so, and find my size and color needs on the Internet.
Out of nowhere, my fairy godmother appeared. OK, it was actually a heavyset middle-aged woman in a terry-cloth tracksuit, but she leaned down and said the magic words that changed my concept of hosiery forever.
“They have all the Spanx and crap over there.” She made a broad sweeping gesture with her arm in the direction of a wall 25 feet away and shuffled off in her athletic sandals before I could thank her.
Apparently, I had managed to miss the big show.
As it turned out, the store didn’t actually sell Spanx, but what I discovered was well worth the short walk.
Spanx, for those as wildly uneducated as myself, are very tight, super-slimming undergarments, mostly resembling varying lengths of cropped pantyhose. They are, essentially, the new American girdle. It seems that millions of women have been squeezing and shimmying their behinds into smaller sizes and slimmer shapes without the traditional boning and bracketry used in the corsets of earlier generations — and I somehow missed the revolution.
Referred to as “shapeware,” Spanx are uncomfortable and require some serious time and effort to don. They are a strange throwback to body-binding beauty techniques many women thought had been left behind decades ago. It seems that the concept of enduring pain to fit a societal cookie-cutter shape has resurfaced big time. Comfortable or not, shapewear is popular as hell and works like a dream. Spanx are so lucrative they have spawned a plethora of spin-offs including the cleverly named line, Assets.
Assets aside, the wall contained other lesser wonders of constriction. Control-tops in seemingly endless levels of severity, anti-cellulite hose, “invigorating” hose for tired legs and feet, hose with magical lycra panels to accentuate “all the right curves,” these pantyhose promised to do everything shy of remodeling my kitchen.
If I thought I had problems before when I couldn’t find my size in the right color, I really had problems now. It was time to evaluate thighs and glutes to see what kind of control I needed to fit in.
I looked in awe, marveling at all of the technology required to make legs and hips and butts look a little bit better. I wondered if I would be able to breathe in a pair of ultra-control tops, and what would happen if one were to wear a pair of Assets too long. Could it cause a lack of circulation? Gangrene? Eventual amputation?
The announcement that the store would be closing in 15 minutes woke me from daydreams of pirate wenches with Spanx pulled over their peg legs just in the nick of time.
Flustered, I snatched up three pairs of hose in three styles for experimentation, paid way too much, and went home. Today I can officially report that all three pairs are extremely hard to get into, make me feel like a sausage in a casing and prevent me from breathing properly. All in all they are ridiculous devices of torture but darn it, my ass looks great.
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