New Market Is Shaping Up for Girdles

Four women are sitting around a table in a Chicago office having lunch. Three, in their early 30s, are eating salads. The other, her early 40s, is drinking a powdered diet shake.

“My sister says I need to lose 15 pounds,” says one of the salad-eaters.

Sighs all around.

The woman with the sister pokes at her vegetables. Then she says it: “I’m thinking of getting a girdle.”

The other two salad-eaters stare at her in disbelief and say nothing.

But not the diet shake drinker.

“If you find a good one,” she says levelly, “let me know.”

If your definition of a good girdle is one that gives you a more shapely figure without cutting off your circulation, then yes, we have found some.

Like bicycle shorts and a lot of exercise wear, these girdles are made almost entirely of lightweight nylon and Lycra, which is Du Pont’s registered name for spandex.

The tube-shaped and long-line girdles prevalent in the past are still out there, but the vast majority are cut like briefs, with a high leg.

And while there are girdles to reduce your figures by one size or several inches, most are now content to lightly smooth, shape and, in the words of a DuPont spokesman, “position.”

One manufacturer described his girdles as having three to four times the control power of control-top panty hose and about half the control power of the girdles worn by many women in the 1950s and early ‘60s.

As for styling, some are almost lacy enough to qualify for the Victoria’s Secret catalogue--although that journal of perfect bodies and saucy lingerie says it has no plans to include them.

With the promise of more breathable materials and a daintier look, the girdle is trying very hard to win back the hearts and minds of American women--at the same time that it stands ready and willing to tame, ever so gently, recalcitrant tummies, hips and derrieres.

And the real news: After 25 years of shunning them, it seems American women are giving girdles a second chance.

“I see a definite growth in what we call the control-bottom business,” says Deborah Press, vice president for apparel research at the NPD Group, a market research company in Port Washington, N.Y.

Press started following girdle sales closely a few years back on a hunch. In 1988, she reports, the total for control-bottom sales at retail and mail-order was $304 million. In 1989, the figure rose to $324 million.

“There has been a real resurgence,” says Cathy Markee, divisional merchandise manager in intimate apparel for Marshall Field’s and Dayton Hudson stores.

Markee says she’s watched demand build over the past two years “and it continues to get stronger.”

“Last year, we did 90% of our business in bras and 10% in control-bottoms,” says Bob Mulrenan, president of Warner’s, a major manufacturer of girdles sold in department stores. “This year, we’re doing 86% of our business in bras and 14% in bottoms. The bottoms business is starting to come back.”

The Olga Co., which is owned by Warner’s, plans several new control-bottom styles for this spring.

“And for a long period, styles were falling by the wayside,” says Norma Fulcher, assistant vice president for advertising.

“Our girdle market had been declining precipitously for years,” says Robert R. Hall, vice president for marketing at Playtex apparel. “Not only has it flattened out, it’s turned around.”

When asked if he had ever thought girdles would start selling again, he replied, simply, “No.”

Carol Columbus-Green, a former model who heads her own Chicago-based corporation that manufactures a lacy, jewel-toned girdle line called Aubergine, started business last May with one retail customer. She’s now shipping to 30 department stores in the Midwest and California.

“I had a gut feeling it would work,” she says.

And a spokesperson for Frederick’s of Hollywood says catalogue sales of control garments have doubled in the past two years. (Frederick’s even offers a control-top garter belt.)

Retailers and intimate apparel people are quick to say that girdles, which retail from $19 to $35, are not roaring back like garter belts did after the movie “Bull Durham.” But something, they say, is definitely happening out there.

The history of women’s controlling foundation garments is long and in some ways twisted. But since an entire generation of women has grown up thinking of the girdle as some kind of instrument of torture from the Dark Ages, a brief recap may be in order.

In the pre-aerobics world, just about every woman wore a girdle--whether she needed it or not. For young women, struggling into that first girdle was as significant a rite of passage as filling up that first brassiere.

By most accounts, the halcyon years for the girdle were the 1950s and early 1960s.

Then came 1965, the year Warner’s Mulrenan describes with one word: catastrophe.

What sent girdle sales plummeting was the arrival of panty hose. Women had bought girdles to hold up their stockings as well as hold in their bulges.

Then the youth revolution delivered the coup de grace. Teen-age Baby Boomers didn’t care a fig about high fashion or even dressing up.

And they associated girdles with their now extremely declasse elders.

The fitness craze followed the Youthquake, and the girdle was soon gone and forgotten, a relic of a flabbier and certainly less disciplined era.

Semantics count for a lot in the girdle business these days. “We’re finding that while women are saying they won’t wear a girdle, if you call it something else they’ll wear it,” says Mulrenan.

Du Pont’s Martin Millman calls them “shapers.” Call it what you may, the girdle does indeed appear to be on the comeback trail. And all the myriad reasons why seem to dovetail into one big one: aging Baby Boomers.