![]() ![]() She has already expanded into legwear (Tight-End Tights) lacy lingerie (Haute Contour) casual separates (Bod a Bing!) and retro, ruffled swimwear. Let’s bring joy back to the experience-have fun when you’re doing it,” meaning exercise. “Everything in our society is so purposeful. ![]() “I started thinking about joy,” Blakely said. She is overseeing a new line of activewear, called In It to Slim It, but there is a desultory feel to the enterprise. “There’s a whole subset of women who don’t relate to that idea,” Blakely said. Spanx’s popularity repudiates the late-twentieth-century belief, perpetuated by Jane Fonda and Nike, that a firm body can be achieved only through sweaty resolve. “I like the concept of ‘have your cake and eat it, too,’ ” Itzler said. Itzler, who is tall and athletic and has curly blond hair, is a former rapper who wrote the nineties Knicks jingle “Go, New York, Go.” He currently owns a marketing and “business incubation” company called Suite 850, and he was proposing a cake-box package for a holiday promotional mailing of men’s Spanx to his influential friends, including Adam Sandler, LeBron James, and Gisele Bündchen, the supermodel, who is married to the Patriots quarterback Tom Brady. “It just really smooths everything out,” she told me. (The company encourages these testimonials by sending starlets regular complimentary shipments.) Gwyneth Paltrow is an outspoken fan, and the famously callipygian television personality Kim Kardashian makes frequent requests for free Spanx. Oprah Winfrey, with her ongoing weight struggles, has been a big booster all along, but admitting that you are wearing Spanx under your evening gown has become standard red-carpet patter even for slender celebrities. ![]() Now unmentionables are not just mentionable but objects of boasting. Another Spanx product, a lightweight girdle called Power Panties that retails for around thirty dollars, has sold six million units since it was introduced, in 2002.īefore Spanx, shapewear was associated with the aging and the piteous (remember Hugh Grant pawing at Renée Zellweger’s thickly swaddled nether regions in “Bridget Jones’s Diary”?). The resulting product, Footless Pantyhose, has sold nine million pairs since October of 2000, when Blakely, who was then a fax-machine saleswoman and a part-time standup comic, started Spanx, with five thousand dollars of savings. “I’ll ask my brother, ‘If you could wave your wand and make your boxer shorts better, what would you do?” Her first big idea, in 1998, was to chop the feet off a pair of control-top panty hose so that she could get a svelte, seamless look under white slacks without stockings poking out of her sandals. “Where I get my energy is: ‘How can I make it better?’ ” Blakely said. “Yes, yes,” Itzler said, rolling his eyes.īlakely, who recently turned forty and is a size 6 (“the largest I’ve ever been,” she said), with long blond hair and bright-white teeth, believes that there is no figure problem-saddlebags, upper-arm jiggle, stomach rolls-that can’t be solved with a little judiciously placed Lycra. “And is the hole big enough? To get through?” Blakely went on, fingering the pouch. “They were, like, ‘It just kind of hangs,’ ” she said. There was also a prototype of black cotton briefs with a sturdy “3D” pouch over the groin, devised by Spanx’s product-development team after several male testers complained to Blakely that they needed more support. “My mom said she’d never laughed harder,” Itzler added. “He said it took him half a day to get into it, and half a day to get out,” she said. “Sara sent my dad, who is going to be eighty-two years old, a tank top,” Itzler said.īlakely smiled. Red boxes of stretchy Spanx undershirts for men were strewn across a table before the couple. One sticky morning last summer, Sara Blakely, the inventor of Spanx, which over the past decade has become to women’s foundation garments what Scotch is to cellophane tape, was sitting in the Park Avenue offices of her husband, Jesse Itzler, confronting a new challenge: the male anatomy.
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