“I think there’s room for another brand to bubble up and master that story,” Ms Harrington said. Perhaps because, despite all the advances in the sector, the predominant aesthetic has remained linked to the barbification of the body.
That’s where Yitty comes in.
A Shorter History of Yitty
While it may seem like Lizzo, 33, is just jumping on the celebrity shapewear bandwagon in the wake of Fenty and Skims, she’s actually been thinking about the industry since she was 12.
That, she said, was when she grew up in Houston (her family had moved from Detroit when she was 10) and, starting in high school, learned to “be ashamed of my body.” Later, once she had begun to assert herself musically, she completely rejected that mentality, and the accompanying underwear. And only after that, when she finally started to “have fun with my body, create shapes and let my body be curvaceous, loved the roles you’re supposed to hide and explore through fashion,” that she began to think again about shapewear.
“I went to a store — I won’t name the store — looking for something for a party,” she said. “And the shapewear aisle was in disarray, like someone went in there in a frenzied spurt looking for something they couldn’t find. There were pieces on the floor and there were only three colors: jet black, ivory white or pink, the color of my nails.”
Lizzo waved her hand, his long, pointed nails the color of ballet shoes. “No one has that color!” she said. She started to seriously change that around the time of “Truth Hurts,” when she had a handful of encounters with different brands. “I was like, ‘Guys, I’m telling you, I’m trying to revolutionize shapewear and our relationship with it and with our bodies,’ and they said, ‘Well, you could do a capsule collection with us for X, Y and Z,’ and I thought, ‘They’re not getting the vision!’”
