February 2, 2011
A trend to watch: Building up the backside
BOOTIES are a-popping. And they aren’t all natural.
Thanks to celebs like Nicky Minaj, Kim Kardashian, Beyonce, Angel Lola Love, Buffy the Body and the rise of the urban model, bubble-shaped derrieres are all the rage and not just in hip-hop music videos or on the red carpet. The designer backsides in demand are exaggerated almost cartoonishly as fashion stylist Phillip Bloch described them last week.
“We see them everywhere. They are particularly sculpted and firm,” Bloch told me.
Be clear, this isn’t about just having a big booty. There are plenty of those around. It’s all about having the right shape. Women – and some men – are going to great lengths to get the desired dimensions, obtaining a Brazilian butt lift, getting dangerous, unregulated injections of silicone and other fillers in salons and apartments, or buying padded panties.
“I like to have curves and it’s now,” said Canise Tortez, a commercial-print model from West Philly who dons padded underwear for appearances in videos such as Chris Brown’s “Back to the Crib.” “It makes a big difference but it’s a subtle difference.
“By me maintaining a normal size, I can throw the butt pads on doing a video real quick,” said Tortez, who’s 5 feet tall and weighs about 130. “It doesn’t look fake at all.”
Mediatakeout.com, a hot urban website, has made a sport of watching whether Minaj, Kardashian and Beyonce have done anything to enhance their already-hourglass shapes. Practically any day you log on, there’s a “does she or doesn’t she” going on.
I don’t have the answers. All I know is that pear-shaped women are forever in the debt of all those who have helped make it fashionable to carry extra junk in the trunk.
It’s still hard for me to imagine wanting to have something extra attached, surgically or otherwise, to the backside. But that’s coming from an amply-endowed woman who is just a generation behind those American females who practically lived in girdles to flatten their bottoms.
The zeitgeist has shifted big time. According to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, there were nearly 5,000 butt-lift surgeries in the U.S. in 2009. And the trend continues.
“It was the only procedure in 2010 that went up. Everything else went down,” said plastic surgeon Constantino Mendieta, the pioneer of the Miami Thong Lift, which creates virtually no visible scar. “Everybody is interested in getting a shapelier butt.
“It’s not just about making the butt bigger. It’s about reshaping the body,” said Mendieta, who’s writing a book called “The Art of Gluteal Reshaping.” “There’s nothing more that draws a man’s eye than the right waist-to-hip ratio.”
But not everybody can invest thousands to get their proportions the way they want them, which is why the Booty Pop padded panty has been such a hot seller. Available at Target, Bed, Bath and Beyond and even Walgreens for about $20, Booty Pop does for posteriors what padded bras do for breasts.
Customers of Booty Pop, which later this year will introduce a man’s backside enhancer called Mr. Booty Pop, have even been known to wear two at a time to increase the size of their cakes. “People always want more or better than they have. No one’s really satisfied,” said Susan Bloomstone, co-founder of the Booty Pop. “We are surrounded by these images, and people are going to take it to the extreme and say, ‘I want more booty.’ ”
The world’s come a long way since the days when an African slave dubbed Hottentot Venus was put on display and treated like a freak in Europe because of her prodigious backside. Now, it seems everyone wants to be bootylicious. And many women are glad of it.
“We’ve been made to feel ashamed. We’ve been made to feel there was something very wrong with our body shapes,” said Myra Mendible, author of “From Bananas to Buttocks: The Latina Body in Popular Film and Culture.”
Mendible, who grew up yearning to be built more like Twiggy than her Cuban mother’s curvaceous friends, continued, “I associated the big butt with vulgarity . . . It kind of became an ethnic marker. It was something I didn’t want to claim at the time. I didn’t want to be somebody who stood out.”
That women feel less pressured to minimize their tushes is progress. “If we are going to go ahead and flaunt this, this can be seen as a positive step,” Mendible added. “It could be seen as celebratory or simply coming to terms with our bodies . . . in the case of the highly exaggerated in-your-face body, this is their way of saying, ‘We have been defined by it and we have reclaimed it and are putting it in your face without fear.’ ”
Which, of course, means that Booty Pop and all those other things to amplify the gluteus maximus aren’t going away.
Ayana Van Putten, a Los Angeles-based stylist who recently dressed singer Keri Hilson, has taken to carrying padded panties to her styling jobs “just in case you need a little more something.”
“A lot of people are using them in photo shoots to add a little extra bump,” she added. “It seems crazy, but it’s really not. It’s just a little something, a temporary fix. I think it’s better than doing it the permanent way.”
