Remember when someone lashed her waist with laces and boning until it was so tiny you could wrap your hands around it? Of course, you remember, given that it was all of a few months ago. Not that we actually wrapped our personal arms around that particular waist, but Jeff Bezos did. There was also a time when a woman squished into a piece of vintage gossamer silk sprinkled with sequins. That was all the way back in 2022, when Kim Kardashian strained the seams of Marilyn Monroe’s “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” dress.
The tiny, tortured waist has returned as a bodily preoccupation, ready to eclipse voluminous breasts and buttocks as areas of obsession, manipulation, distortion and angst.
While some women are Scarlett O’Hara-ing themselves into gowns fitted with bespoke corsetry, plastic surgeons are working on more permanent methods to create the wasp waist, the ant waist, or what the leading surgeon in this emerging subspecialty calls the “Barbie waist.”
The new approach to the waist originated in Russia in 2017, when a doctor decided to explore an alternative to rib removal, which was the way some surgeons — though not many — had whittled the waist in the past. The procedure is exactly what it sounds like: an operation in which the surgeon completely or partly extracts the 11th and 12th “floating” ribs. It’s an operation that carries “considerable risks” and “significant detrimental effect on lung and respiratory functions,” wrote Dr. Alfredo E. Hoyos and his colleagues in “Waistline Aesthetic Slimming by Puncture and Parallel Approach for Rib Remodeling Procedures,” a medical paper.
Dr. Kazbek Kudzaev, the innovator from Vladikavkaz, Russia, is even harsher in his assessment of rib removal, calling it “mutilating surgery.” In an interview with a translator over WhatsApp, he said: “Rib removal surgery contradicts the main principle of medicine, ‘primum non nocere,’” first, do no harm. “It is a harmful and dangerous technique.”
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