It has been 21 years since Sex and the City’s Samantha Jones uttered the words “nipples are huge right now” – yet here we are again. This time, though, nipples are so huge as to be worthy of adornment. “Pasties” – self-adhesive nipple covers usually worn under clothes in lieu of a bra – are being worn proudly, in metallics rather than muted tones, as part of an outfit rather than behind-the-scenes staging.
They have, in fashion circles, gone the way of lingerie: underwear as outerwear, the externalisation of something that was once meant to be concealed. Pasties are no longer sharing space with hidden necessities, such as boob tape or bunion insoles; instead, they are the stars of the show.
At fashion’s biggest annual do, the Met Gala, the model and actor Cara Delevingne wore a smooth gold pair on the red carpet, while the model Bella Hadid wore a pretty scalloped-edged beaded pair to an afterparty. The pop star Doja Cat wore a pointed golden pair with her Schiaparelli gown to the Billboard Music awards.
Elsewhere, they have trickled down to the cultural barometer that is reality TV, featuring under a see-through bodystocking worn by Made in Chelsea’s Maeva D’Ascanio. They are peeking through on the high street, too, clearly visible on Asos models sporting sheer tops.
“The fashion for pasties on the red carpet is not entirely unprecedented,” says Sarah Thornton, the author of Uplifting Sagas: The Top Half of Women’s Liberation. “The pasty arose with burlesque as a commercial form of bare-breasted entertainment. There was no widespread need for them before that. Also, the availability of easy, cheap, gentle adhesives was a necessary precursor – hence their name, which derives from the word ‘paste’.“The burlesque cliche is that they are ‘boob jewellery’. They draw attention to nipples as much as they mask them. When I think of the history of pasties, I see red satin, sequins, rhinestones, diamantes, silk tassels.” In this way, their latest incarnation is more in line with their burlesque backstory than their more recent deployment to hide nipples.
The fashion psychologist Carolyn Mair believes Delevingne and Doja Cat “chose to wear these accessories to draw attention and to titillate observers”, with their visible pasties often far from natural in appearance.
It is also in step with broader shifts in fashion. In the later stages of the pandemic, the elastic waist has lost its bounce and there has been an increase in people dressing unapologetically sexily. After several years languishing in floaty oversized “nap” or house dresses – more Kansas than kink – it seems many are ready for a gear shift.
At the more extreme end, there has been a spike in interest in the fetish aesthetic. Kim Kardashian has been dressing in latex gimp masks and Balenciaga’s Demna Gvasalia ramped things up with a spring show that brought BDSM to the New York stock exchange.
With the female nipple such a hotly contested body part – Instagram still censors them on women’s bodies, despite a campaign to “free the nipple” – the artist-activist Micol Hebron has even made “pasties with a male nipple on them, which are indistinguishable from a female nipple that hasn’t breastfed”, explains Thornton. Is this way of wearing pasties giving two fingers to the policing of female bodies? “I see [celebrities’] pasty-adorned breasts as political, in the sense that they are drawing attention to the unequal censorship of male and female chests,” she says.
Another reading: considering the various ways fashion has found to showcase other parts of the breast – from the underboob that made waves on last summer’s Love Island to side boob and the more traditional idea of cleavage – it is high time to let the maligned nipple shine.
