Butt-Enhancing Jeans Are the Modern Bustle

Levi’s-Revel-570

Mary Reporting.
This morning as I breezed through Juniors at a local mall, I stopped dead. A large cardboard poster featuring a drawing of a teen in jeans proclaimed in large letters: WANNA BETTA BUTT?

The text continued:
YMI
No kidding.
With specially designed contour seams to help you achieve a flattering, firmer look, these jeans hug you in just the right place.
There’s no butts about it.

The YMI Jeans rack beckoned. I turned a pair inside out to search for discernable seams designed to make the derriere more prominent. I couldn’t see anything obvious, but the entire fabric was stretchy. It stretched up and down and side to side, so I suspected it possessed internal weaving at just the spot for rear- end augmentation.

In the dressing room, I removed my wide-leg wool trousers and put my legs in the proper holes. These jeans were tight, reminiscent of a pair of leggings. The blue denim clamped around my ankles, my calves, my thighs, my stomach and my bottom.

Upward I pulled. I zipped and buttoned, then twisted my body to get a glimpse of my derriere in the mirror. The tight-fitting waist—actually at the waist, and not four inches below it—contributed greatly to the effect of a well-rounded rear. Yes, my bottom seemed a little larger, more defined, but the look didn’t suit me.

The sales clerk said young girls are buying these jeans because they want to look like Kim Kardashian. Was this really the newest way to keep up with the Kardashians?

I murmured that I wrote historical romances and this look seemed to be a throwback to the bustle of the 1880s. I noted that the tighter the waist, the larger the lady’s bottom looked and vice versa. The bustle was an attempt to highlight the much-admired tiny waist. The look fell from fashion when the rear protuberance became so large that ladies found it difficult to climb aboard an omnibus or walk into a dry goods store. See our earlier blogpost on Victorian bustles here. http://bit.ly/1mVoWmD

I raced home to google “butt-enhancing jeans.” Kim Kardashian didn’t start the trend. The look hails from Brazil (called the Brazilian jean or jeans levanta cola) and recently became popular in Columbia as well.

Levi’s, not to be left out, began selling Levi’s-Revel- 570s in August 2013. According to the Huff Post, Levi’s uses “a four-way stretch fabric comprised of cotton, polyester, Lycra and DuPont’s Sorona fiber. It then prints a proprietary liquid chemical formula on the fabric interior that regulates the level of stretch in strategic areas.”

It’s a high-tech approach to minimizing the stomach and lifting the seat. Read the Huff Post account here: http://huff.to/1oHCIxA.

It wasn’t too long ago that I joined the long line of women who sought a sleek look in Not Your Daughters Jeans. These jeans have visible reinforced panels made with elastic in the proper places to minimize stomach, hips and buttocks. For women who grew up trying to look like Twiggy, it’s the coveted look.