Meet fashion’s new erogenous zone: The bare bottom.

© Shutterstock

From Mowalola’s pelmet mini skirts to Instagram’s booty shots, fashion’s new focus on buttock cleavage is a pop-culture phenomenon with a political backbone.

We’re halfway through the August vacation and social media’s celebrity ‘belfie’ (buttock selfie) trend shows no signs of slowing—note the recent re-release of thong-inventor Rudi Gernreich’s revolutionary high-cut swimwear. The ‘belfie’ itself sits firmly within Instagram’s body positivity culture: beyond the well-documented posterior clout of the Kardashian/Jenner camp, the likes of Lizzo, Rosalía and Emily Ratajkowski are turning booty shots into a pop-culture phenomenon with a political backbone.

On the flipside, it’s also having a lucrative impact on the cosmetic surgery industry. In America alone, there’s been a staggering 256 per cent increase in buttock lift procedures between 2000 and 2018, and buttock augmentation procedures using ‘fat grafting’ increased by 19 per cent between 2017 and 2018, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons.

With more women than ever before choosing to alter the shape of their buttocks (or expose more of them), the question in the Vogue office is: How are designers tapping into the world’s fast-growing focus on the bottom?


By Julia Hobbs.
Full story at Vogue.