No Beating Around the Bush

Kim Kardashian’s SKIMS Thong Is an Appropriation of Queer History 

Written by: Lily Moskowitz 

Coauthored by: Serenity Garcia, Kasey Kutcher, and Audrey Zelinka 

Photos by: Madison Paloski

Counterculture is dead, nothing is subversive, and we are terribly unshockable. Thanks to the massification of culture and the sensation-seeking appetite of the algorithm, visual emblems of transgression have been co–opted, flattened, and resold to us as microtrends. Grunge aesthetics know no anarchy. Punk is a pair of Demonia boots. What were once iterations of political resistance on the body are now a means to a short-lived end, where codes of dress are vague, hollowed, and indecipherable from their social origins. 

We can now add pubic hair to this list. On October 14th, Kim Kardashian released a line of 'faux hair thongs' with her shapewear brand, SKIMS. For $32, you could purchase a furry g-string with polyamide pubes in a wide variety of colors and textures. Blonde or brunette, blown-out, ginger, coarse, curly: the entire drop sold out in a few short hours. 

You probably already saw this on the Internet. You probably laughed, kept scrolling, or even ordered a pair. But in dire times – times when reproductive rights have regressed to a state of biofascism, queer and trans lives are on the frontlines of legislative harm, and the militancy of embodiment is such that American Eagle can casually post a eugenics campaign – the politics of the body are unignorable, urgent, and far more serious than they appear. 

So in dire times like these, we must interrogate the consequences of a mass-produced bush. 

What does it mean for pubic hair to enter the mainstream visual diet? What does it mean for Kim Kardashian – a straight, cisgendered woman and the (unofficial) final boss of heterosexist desirability standards – to sell an appropriated version of the symbol historically associated with feminist and lesbian embodiment? 

Is the SKIMS thong a diplomatic marketing stunt? Absurdist humor? Yet another recession indicator? Or a genuine reversal of Everything the Kardashian brand represents? 

For some context, we must acknowledge the hairy elephant in the room, that is, the complex history of the merkin. The practice of wearing pubic wigs, or merkins, began in 1400s Europe and remained popular through the 18th century. Historically made from horsehair, goat hair, or hair from human corpses, the merkin is rooted in class division and gendered labor; due to the prevalence of pubic lice and syphilis in the 1400s, hair was considered a sign of health and nobility. While the wealthy could afford to maintain their pubic hair, lower and working-class people often shaved in order to prevent or remove lice. As a result, merkins emerged as a useful tactic for sex workers in particular to disguise signs of illness, infestation, or scarring from sexually transmitted diseases. 

Merkins therefore allowed sex working women to remain employed and financially support themselves. A reclamatory feminist reading of the merkin might frame it as a survival tactic or a life-saving device; though generally and etymologically speaking, the merkin was considered an object of deep shame, immorality, and abjection. From the Oxford Companion to the Body, the word merkin is theorized to originate from "malkin," a derogatory term for a lower-class or "sluttish” woman. Classy, no? 

Contemporary revivals of the merkin serve a far different purpose than these oppressive roots, appearing quite playfully in film, fashion, art, and media. In twentieth-century English theatre, male actors wore merkins to play female characters (which is undeniably queercoded). Golden Age Hollywood used merkins to conceal full frontal nudity and get around MPAA's censorship regulations. A merkin was even fashioned for Kate Winslet for the cinematic adaptation of The Reader in 2008, though she refused to wear it in the film. 

In the twenty-first century, the merkin has diverged entirely from its original function as a concealment mechanism. It is now worn for high visibility provocation, extravagance, gender deviation, irony, and adornment: from drag performances to burlesque costuming. Avant-garde and outsider artists have interpreted the merkin as an experimental medium, fabricating witty and satirical iterations of the object in unconventional materials – fishskins, bobby pins, and blades being some personal favorites from the Intimate Apparel merkin exhibition circa 2007. 

Queer artists and performers have long kept the merkin alive as both satire and survival. In drag shows and dyke cabarets, it reappears as a site where gender exaggerates itself, where bodies reclaim what shame tried to take. In these contexts, the merkin is not a disguise but a declaration – a prosthetic that says 'I'm here, and I'm performing the joke on my own terms.' It queers visibility itself: too hairy, too loud, too knowing to ever pass as fashion. 

Though high fashion has also taken a liking to the merkin as an iteration of radical embodiment, from Vivienne Westwood's iconic fig merkins (1989) and bushkini (1994) to South Korean designer Kaimin's mohawk merkins (2018). Most recently, John Galliano debuted artisanal merkins at Maison Margiela's Spring/Summer 2024 couture show, situating the bush and its textures as a site of beauty, value, and craftsmanship. 

(Of course, Margiela is an atelier with a reputation for recreating garments from history – the brand's Replica line is specifically dedicated to this practice – so this revival of the merkin could also be read as an ode to tradition or an appreciation of sartorial lineage. Martin Margiela additionally has a bit of a fetish for hair, as he was raised by a hairdresser and has frequently included hair in his artwork and designs). 

Runway renditions of the merkin, rather than bringing pubic hair into the realm of the universally stylish or desirable, maintain a sense of the countercultural. The designers who have placed the merkin in high visibility have done so under the guise of artistic license, contextual awareness, and reputations for deviance that align with a body-as-politic ethos. 

Hold on, Kim, we're getting to you. 

Westwood, for instance, flashed Queen Elizabeth and wardrobed the Sex Pistols. Her incarnations of the merkin are inherently embedded in her affinity for transgression, for the perilous, for pushing beyond the pale of both quotidian style norms and high fashion spaces, where body hair remains perverse. A trompe l'oeil hairsuit featuring male bush was met with scathing controversy just last month at Duran Lantink's debut collection for Jean Paul Gaultier: an especially surprising rejection of radical embodiment considering Gaultier's largely queer following. 

So, although the bush and the merkin are showing up in fashion, visibility does not necessitate tolerability. High fashion moves several paces ahead of what the general public is wearing, and for the bush to be "in" on the runway does not necessarily indicate that it is "in" for the mainstream consumer. 

Despite a brief stint of full-bush summer popularized on TikTok, the laser hair removal industry has reached its highest net worth ever, according to Fortune, with a $1.2 billion market in the United States alone. Additional studies show that "91.5 percent of U.S. women shave their legs, 93 percent of U.S. women shave their underarms, and more than 99 percent of U.S. women removed body hair at some point in their lives." 

Even style provocateurs have only just begun to embrace the aesthetics of the abject body. Doja Cat flaunted a full bush at the Grammys red carpet, and Julia Fox is pioneering menstrual glam. But the position of pubic hair as fashionable has not yet been integrated into mainstream comportments. 

Enter Kim K, whose SKIMS thong bridges the gap between high fashion and the everyday consumer. Kim Kardashian's potency in the pop cultural zeitgeist is undeniable; she is singlehandedly credited for the revival of shapewear and for inciting the BBL epidemic; the fluctuating states of her body seem to steer the standard for what women's bodies should aspire to look like. If her merkin underwear is a genuine embrace of pubic hair, the echoes could be powerful enough to bankrupt the laser hair removal industry entirely. 

In some ways, this is exciting. A mass-produced, financially accessible merkin has the potential to bring the bush back in fashion on a large scale, for a significantly less avant-garde audience than its high-fashion predecessors. Yay! 

Yet the authenticity of this gesture is difficult to believe. For Kim Kardashian – a monetized ambassador for the plastic, smooth, hairless, modified, surgeried body – to promote the bush feels oxymoronic, a contradiction in terms. 

First of all, the SKIMS merkin ad campaign centers on the tagline "Does the Carpet Match the Drapes?": a crude expression referring to whether or not the hair on a woman's head matches the shade of her pubic hair. The misogyny underlying this phrase feels to offset or cancel out any kind of feminist, progressive, or body-positive intentions with the product's release. 

Turning the bush into a commercial product also defangs pubic hair's function as an instrument of sociopolitical resistance.The SKIMS thong is market-making rather than meaning-making. The queer community in particular has dubbed it an act of "stolen valor." Because let's not beat around the bush: having pubic hair is an inherently feminist and lesbian act. 

As I'm sure we all may be familiar, second-wave feminism paraded body hair in the late 1960s as a symbol of social liberation and a violation of heteronormative desirability standards. Hair removal has historically operated as a means to profit capitalism, to indulge the infantilization fetish, to demand frictionlessness, and most significantly, to require complicity with heterosexist bodily norms. 

Having body hair is therefore associated with deviance, otherness, and an assault on heterosexuality that inevitably implicates feminism and lesbianism. Statistically speaking, the link between pubic hair and lesbianism holds true; from critical body studies theorist Breanne Fahs' paper Dreaded Otherness, "among women in the United States, feminist identity and lesbian identity predict decreased likelihood of hair removal." 

Kim Kardashian has no stake in the game. 

The stereotype of the hairy lesbian/hairy feminist is one of derogatory association: to have hair is to be dirty, unkempt, undesirable. To have a bush is to decenter the patriarchal metric of appearances, queer the body politic, and disrupt expectations of compulsory femininity. But to openly and purposefully have a bush – or to wear a merkin in the twenty-first century – is barbed and dangerous. It is threatening, uncompromising, emancipatory, a complete rupture from respectability politic and a middle-fingered resistance to everything a woman is asked to be. 

Kim Kardashian has no stake in the game. 

In 1969, performance artist VALIE EXPORT held viewers at gunpoint in the cinema and demanded that they look at her unshaved vagina. She called the piece "Action Pants: Genital Panic." In 2005, Marina Abramovic recreated it at the Guggenheim. 

Kim Kardashian has no stake in the game. 

Several studies on lesbians' relationship to physicality, grooming, and adornment emphasize hair as an integral mode through which dyke, butch, and transmasc lesbians communicate identity. It's the split-ended tension of a boyish haircut and a full bush, one that scholars Célia Laplace and Sophie Devineau deem a "subversive weapon," a "strategy for claiming power," and a "stake in the fight against the system of masculine domination." 

Kim Kardashian has no stake in the game. 

Helen Chadwick photographed herself lying corpse-like, nude, thinly veiled, and full-bushed in a coffin-cum-refrigerator. The year was 1977. She titled the image "In The Kitchen (Fridge)." 

Kim Kardashian has no stake in the game. 

Her commercialization of the bush enacts what fashion theorist Maria McKinney Valentin calls signification exhaustion, or when an image loses its "intrinsic meaning because the visual signs are removed from the culture that generated them." The mass production of the merkin recalls philosopher Walter Benjamin's notion of aura degradation, in which the technological reproduction of an art object erodes it of its authenticity, "profoundly modifying [its] effects." 

Kim Kardashian has no stake in the game, but she is a marketing genius. She has perfectly placed a commercial substitution for the hair that she has publicly encouraged women to remove. Fashion stylist Law Roach, when asked his thoughts on the SKIMS thong, articulated the Kardashians' marketing tactic with the poise of heavy PR training: "We are all waiting to buy something from them. Maybe they haven't invented it, yet but I truly believe that they will. And when they do, we'll all buy it." 

But instead of buying it, you can grow your own bush. You can make your own merkin. Or you could even attend the Lesbian Studies conference, where a group of unruly dykes hosted the DIY merkin making workshop pictured in this article. 

Perhaps Kim Kardashian's faux hair g-string is a humorous iteration of body modification and parody, an extension of her body's own falsehood. Perhaps she's banking on the same irony of artifice as a previous SKIMS product that reached virality (ie, the nipple push-up bra that was designed to emulate not wearing a bra while still wearing one). Maybe Kim K is actually a lesbian with an acute feminist sensibility and a cutting sense of wit. 

Regardless of your take on the intentions of the SKIMS thong, its reception must be contextualized within the brand's long-held strategy of popularizing aesthetics from systemically marginalized communities – namely Black communities and sex workers – to plump and pad the Kardashian pocket. It must also be understood as inextricable from the history of women's oppression, queer oppression, and the exploitation of gendered labor. 

One thing is clear from the sold-out merkin: we're starting to buy the idea of the bush. But some things should not be for sale. The bush was never meant to be curated, color-matched, or algorithmically optimized; it was meant to grow unruly, to mark the body as its own territory. The queer and feminist histories of the merkin remind us that resistance can be soft, tangled, handmade, and defiantly visible. What Kim Kardashian sells as parody, we have long understood as praxis: the refusal to be made palatable. You don't need a checkout cart to reclaim your flesh. You grow it. You wear it wrong. You show it anyway.