When Skims released a $32 thong affixed with synthetic pubic hair last week, the stir was almost immediate. Reactions ranged from confusion and outrage to amusement and applause. But not everybody was thrown for a loop.
“I wasn’t shocked,” said Mandy Lee, a content creator with a background in tracking fashion and beauty trends. “They’re seeing the value in the buzz that that’s going to create,” added Ms. Lee, 34, who in December shared a TikTok video in which she argued that fashion’s on-and-off fixation with body hair was heating up again.
Designers who have experimented with showing hair (or facsimiles of it) in recent years include Dilara Findikoglu, who has sent sheer dresses interlaced with hair down the runway; Simone Rocha, who designed bow earrings made of hair for Jean Paul Gaultier; Daniel Roseberry of Schiaparelli, who created neckties out of braided hair; and Hillary Taymour, whose spring 2026 collection for Collina Strada features hats and beanies made of synthetic and human hair.
In her TikTok video, Ms. Lee particularly emphasized a resurgence of pubic hair in fashion, like the merkin wigs worn by models in John Galliano’s headline-making Maison Margiela Artisanal couture show last year. This month, about a week before Skims released its merkinlike thong, the designer Duran Lantink featured a bodysuit printed with chest and pubic hair in his spring 2026 runway show for Jean Paul Gaultier.
Ms. Lee attributed designers’ renewed interest in experimenting with hair down there to a desire to shock a world that has become increasingly desensitized.
“With the internet, we’ve seen people getting murdered by police,” she said. “We’ve seen children getting shot in their own schools. People have been watching this happen on their screens. So what can fashion, something that is so arbitrary in comparison, really do to cause shock and discomfort anymore?”
Startling people by showing bush has long been a bankable way for fashion brands to seize attention. People still talk about Tom Ford’s 2003 Gucci ad featuring pubic hair groomed to resemble the label’s “G” logo (a stunt that Supreme mimicked on a T-shirt released in 2022), and about Carla Bruni, the model who went on to become the first lady of France, walking in a Vivienne Westwood show in 1994 wearing only a faux fur coat and a merkin.
The hairy look being pushed by some fashion brands lately comes after years of grooming trends prescribing hairless bodies: Brazilian waxes, for instance, and pricey laser treatments that permanently remove hair from faces and other areas.
Some see designers’ recent experimentations with clothing bodies in hair as a move away from the smooth-skinned look and toward embracing imperfection in a culture of sameness now largely driven by algorithms. Outside fashion, this shift has been reflected in razor ads featuring women with underarm hair and in social media campaigns like Januhairy, which encourages growing out body hair as a New Year’s resolution.
But to people like Liz Plank, who hosts the “Boy Problems” podcast and writes the Substack newsletter Airplane Mode, there is an inherent irony in the way fashion is peddling the embrace of body hair.
“It’s just selling natural beauty back to women instead of just letting them be,” Ms. Plank, 38, said. “It’s still sort of cosplaying natural beauty, but needing for it to be actually still aesthetic. It’s not natural if it has to look a certain way and if you buy a product to achieve it.”
Yola Mzizi is a reporter for the Styles section and a member of the 2025-2026 Times Fellowship class, a program for journalists early in their careers.
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