Earlier this month, Kim Kardashian called on women everywhere to get their ass up and work, which is a comment she has perhaps come to regret – not least because of the social media pile-on but because Lizzo just announced the launch of her first business: YITTY, a line of size-inclusive shapewear. “I was tired of seeing this sad, restrictive shapewear that literally no-one wanted to wear,” the musician, who has been wearing constricting undergarments since she was ten years old, said in an accompanying press release. “I had an epiphany like, ‘who can actually do something about this?’ I decided to take on the challenge of allowing women to feel unapologetically good about themselves again.”
Arriving with three collections – NEARLY NAKED, an everyday range, MESH ME, a daring underwear-as-outerwear capsule, and a loungewear offering, MAJOR LABEL – Lizzo has transformed her own experience as a bigger-bodied woman into a fully-fledged, Fabletics-backed business. “I felt that I was constantly being told through TV and magazines that my body wasn’t good enough. And, in order to be considered ‘acceptable’ I had to inflict some sort of pain upon it to fit into an archetype of beauty. Because of this, I’ve been wearing shapewear for a long time, maybe since I was in fifth or sixth grade,” she explained.
What sets YITTY (named after the singer’s childhood nickname) apart from most other brands on the market, however, is its approach to sizing, which hasn’t been scaled up or down, but fit independently on every size and body type. Skewing the well-oiled celeb-to-makeup entrepreneur pipeline, the brand has taken three years to come to fruition and Lizzo hopes it will spark a revolution in the language we use to speak about women’s bodies. “Instead of thinking about size in this linear way, we’re thinking about it on a spectrum where everyone is included. Everyone’s size is just their size. It’s not high, it’s not low. It’s not big, it’s not small. It’s just your size.”
YITTY will launch online on April 12, ranging in size from 6X to XS and includes over 100 pieces, among them thongs, leggings, shorts, and bras.
