They’re the nation’s favourite bra retailer, selling 45 bras 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 our backsides a bit of oomph.
‘We’re doing for bums what we’ve done for boobs for years’ they say.
M&S hails its new £15 knickers with built-in padding to give backsides oomph and create an ample-bottomed curvy silhouette
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’ve had requests from both UK and international customers”, says M&S’s 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 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 more curvaceous behind.
However, the store can’t claim to be the first to stock this ingenious pant solution. Ms Kardashian’s underwear label Skims currently offers padded pants, as does the shapewear brand Spanx.
