While women have poured, squeezed and crushed their way into bodyshaping garments for centuries, men have got off relatively lightly. But a new men's girdle aims to change that. Oliver Good tries it out. I've been getting that constricted feeling lately. It's usually accompanied by shortness of breath and droplets of moisture on my brow. It's a feeling of being crushed by the weight of it all. But it is not indigestion, existential paranoia or the onset of a heart attack. I've taken to wearing a male corset.
Well, that's not quite accurate: I didn't need a manservant to lace me into my Equmen Core Precision Undershirt, but getting it on by myself is no picnic. In beauty magazine vernacular, these undershirts are "Spanx for men". Instead of promising to suck in flabby hips and bums, these Spandex-infused polyester vests use what they call a "helix mapping system" to pull in a chap's paunch and hide his handles.
The garment managed to take an inch or two off my ample waistline in as many seconds as it took to squeeze into it. It may even make that just-a-little-too-tight shirt wearable once again. And I dare say a better toned physique wouldn't be harmed by the undershirt. Its stretchy bits are in all the right places to counteract your ... well, stretchy bits and make the toned bits look even tighter. Unfortunately, this all comes at a price. Anyone who has worn a wetsuit on dry land or several layers of thermals under a ski jacket will know the feeling. "Constricting" doesn't even come close. Trying to walk without doing robot arms was hard enough. When I sat down, I began to worry whether the blood was still reaching my feet and decided that the danger of gangrene was not an acceptable price to pay for a six pack.
Meal times pose interesting challenges when one is wearing what I have dubbed the Restricto Max. Bringing a knife and fork together is difficult, as the arms feel spring loaded and ready to fire backwards. And the prospect of trying to fit food into an already highly condensed torso is enough to affect the appetite. The next big obstacle is the five minute, 42°C walk from my air conditioned apartment to my air conditioned workplace. It's a Herculean struggle. Nobody in their right mind would layer clothes in the Arabian summer anyway, but having this polyester, nylon and spandex ensemble hugging my skin was worse than I could have ever imagined. The discomfort lessened only slightly when I entered a cooler environment, proving that, if nothing else, the undergarment is reliable - it can make the wearer feel hot and bothered in almost any temperature.
Equmen's website has a detailed diagram of the shirt's design, with arrows pointing to "ventilation". In most high-performance garments, air reaches the necessary parts by way of little holes or patches of porous fabric under the arms. The ventilated parts of this vest might be porous when compared to the rest of the garment, but they are still skin-tight, man-made fibres. The highly engineered ventilation system no doubt makes the wearer sweat a little less, but you will still sweat more than if you weren't wearing the infernal thing in the first place.
Surely a serious product could never be so useless. Could I have tried on the wrong size? The Equmen Precision Undershirt's packing comes with a graph to help the wearer find the correct size for his height and weight. I fell straight in the middle of large. What came out of the box, however, could be described as anything but large. I double checked the label just to be sure there wasn't a mistake. It looked like a child's swimming costume.
Equmen's promotional literature states that the vests have a number of secondary benefits. They provide "core stability", transferring energy from the centre of the body out to the limbs. Unfortunately for Equmen, I've always believed that if someone begins talking about "energy" and they don't mean the type that comes from power stations, it's time to stop listening. The undergarment might succeed in concealing flab, but it comes at a grave price. My biggest problem with the Equmen Precision Undershirt is not that it is constricting, hot or uncomfortable. Even if the claimed figure-enhancing effect came with a pleasant wearing experience, there would be no excuse for such a flagrant exercise in narcissism. The creators of this item have forgotten that, thankfully, there's a little less pressure on us men to look good. Let's cherish that fact, loosen our belts a couple of notches and relax.
Visit www.equmen.com.