It’s the nation’s favourite bra retailer, selling 45 every minute, but this season Marks & Spencer is having a go at lifting another part of the female anatomy.
The store is launching knickers with built-in padding to give backsides a bit of oomph.
They will be available from May in 35 stores and online at £15 a pair. They are designed with two removable convex pads that sit atop the wearer’s buttocks to create a curvy silhouette.
‘We’re doing for bums what we’ve done for boobs for years,’ says Soozie Jenkinson, head of lingerie design at Marks & Spencer.
The retailer may be dominant in the UK bra market, but, she says, it’s perky rears that shoppers are demanding right now.
It’s the nation’s favourite bra retailer, selling 45 every minute, but this season Marks & Spencer is having a go at lifting another part of the female anatomy. The store is launching knickers with built-in padding to give backsides a bit of oomph
Kim Kardashian (pictured above at the Vanity Fair Oscars Party) popularised the larger rear
‘We’ve had requests from both UK and international customers,’ says Ms Jenkinson, who calls the pants the ‘BBS’ – bum-boosting shorts.
The popularity of bigger rears is, in part, a result of the Kim Kardashian effect.
The ample-bottomed US reality TV star has helped shift the female body ideal away from the petite posteriors of the nineties and noughties towards an hourglass look. And plenty of women are willing to go to extreme lengths to get it.
In 2021, nearly 400,000 women worldwide had a Brazilian Butt Lift, surgery which takes fat from elsewhere in the body and pumps it into the bottom.
According to the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery this is a 20 per cent rise on 2017, despite it costing more than £7,500 and having the highest mortality rate of any cosmetic surgery.
While your average M&S customer might not go to the lengths of having surgery, they may still want a perter bottom.
But the store can’t claim to be the first to stock the ingenious pant solution.
Ms Kardashian’s underwear label Skims offers padded pants, as does the shapewear brand Spanx.
But this is quite a gear shift for M&S, a bellwether brand for national shopping habits. Its best-selling underwear is currently high-leg briefs.
Ms Jenkinson adds: ‘We’re going out more and it’s making us think about lingerie solutions to help us get dressed up again. Our underwear offering reflects not just changes in fashion and lifestyle but also in body shape.’