Fashion’s Love Affair with the Bush

To help Miranda deal with the “national forest” between her legs, Samantha offers to set up an appointment for her with the hotel’s in-spa waxer. Ashamed and hurt, Miranda storms off, but not without lashing out one last time: “I let the sex go out of my marriage. I deserve what I got?!”

The scene demonstrates how women’s pubes were generally viewed in the aughts: with shame. As unsexy, unkempt, unhygienic—as if they required maintenance. “The idea that pubic hair needs to be cleaned up, groomed, trim, [as if] there’s something innately obscene about it, or wrong with it, is very much related to beauty standards, to women specifically,“ said Cora Harrington, an author and lingerie expert.

In 2024, journalist Jessica DeFino polled 14,000 readers about their grooming habits down there and shared findings in her advice column for the Guardian. “Of the straight women polled, 82% remove some of their pubic hair—but only 15% of respondents say they’re completely bare down there. Forty per cent maintain a bikini-shaped bush (only removing the hair that would stick out of a bikini bottom), 29.5% report rocking either a full bush or a slightly trimmed full bush, and 11% leave a small landing strip,” she reported.

Her conclusion? The bush, or at least some iteration of it, is back.

Fashion has steadily supported the bush agenda for a few seasons now. Most memorably, models for Maison Margiela’s Spring 2024 show models sported visible merkins (pubic toupees) peaking through the pieces, and both Doja Cat and Julia Fox let short and curlies show on the red carpet. Dilara Findikoglu and Kim Shui have AW 25 pieces that let the hair hang. And Jenna Lyons, the former president and creative director of J. Crew, the historically clean cut American brand, [showed off her “silky” pubes on The Real Housewives of New York .

But, why did it become customary to be completely bare down there? Early pubic hair removal dates back to ancient Egypt, Rome and Greece, but they were mostly for health and religious reasons or to align with class and status.

In the centuries that followed, women’s body hair was mostly a non-issue, Harrington said. “For a long time, women’s body hair, underarm hair, leg hair, and then also pubic hair, would have been one of those things because bodies were so covered.”

Technically, the bikini was introduced in July 1946 in France, although different two-piece swimwear iterations have popped up at various points throughout history. The conservative ‘50s attempted to keep the midriff covered, but the modern bikini became more widely adopted by the ‘60s.

A time of political unrest and essential social movements, the ‘60s and the ‘70s became more experimental when it came to personal style and grooming. Even with the introduction of the mod micro mini and lowrise bell bottoms, the bush withstood fashion trends. It was more about women’s autonomy and the second wave of feminism than fashion following unrealistic expectations of trad wives in the prior decade. “In theory, it’s a bit more of a liberated time. There’s the hippie movement and broader messaging around nature and a more natural look, so there’s less pressure to remove pubic hair,” said Rachael Gibson, the writer behind The Hair Historian.

The most obvious way to observe the evolution of the bush in America lives within pages of Playboy Magazine, which launched in 1953, though Playmates weren’t featured fully nude until 1972.

Through the ‘70s and ‘80s, the look is largely au naturale or with light grooming. In the early ‘90s the grass on the field started to appear a little cleaned up around the bikini line, but it was still very present and full. So much so that in the July 1991 issue centerfold Wendy Kaye is pictured backlit and bent over on all fours with a soft glow showing through her pubes.

Then in 1994, the Brazilian wax was introduced by Jocely, Jonice, Joyce, Janea, Jussara, Juracy, and Judsela Padihla, seven sisters from Brazil who owned and operated their salon in NYC named J Sisters. At the time, tiny bikinis were popular in Rio de Janeiro, a sharp rebuke of the high waisted, high-cut bathing suits and aerobics outfits of the ‘80s and early ‘90s. Pubes in Playboy, Madonna’s renowned Sex book (released in ‘92), and even Herb Ritts’s 1998 nude photos of the supermodel set that featured Cindy Crawford’s netherhair led one to believe it was objectively the norm until the grooming got more drastic. “It went from being something that I think people were just okay with and saw as normal to something that had more stigma,” Harrington said.

Clothes got tinier and tinier (think: lowrise jeans, miniskirts, thongs), and, sex sold everything. Sisqo’s “The Thong Song” released in 1999, and sales of the garment at Victoria’s Secret apparently jumped 80 percent. As panty lines vanished, Halle Berry, Gillian Anderson, and their thongs put whale tails on the red carpet. Fashion that once only required a lightly manicured bikini line shrunk to accommodate a perfectly precise landing strip and, eventually, required women to go fully bare down there.

In 2003, at the height of the Brazilian, Tom Ford published a mischievous Gucci ad shot by Mario Testino in which a model’s panties are being pulled down by her male counterpart, revealing public hair styled into the letter “G.” The ad was scandalous for its time, and there were calls for it to be banned. But time ameliorates shock value. Nearly 20 years later, the image would end up on a Supreme shirt.

The years 2006 and 2007 brought a deluge of crude paparazzi pics of bald vaginas and leaked celeb sex tapes. Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, and Paris Hilton partying pantiless were so well-documented that “Britney” became slang for women’s genitalia. Gossip blogs like Perez Hilton reigned supreme. When the nudes of Vanessa Hudgens leaked, she was relentlessly ridiculed for having pubic hair. “I remember she had a full bush, and people on the internet treated it like it was the funniest thing that ever happened,” Gibson recalled. Her theory is that the receding hairlines of women’s nether regions were parallel to the expansion of availability of porn and better tech, namely cameras and screens to view them on. “Super quickly, it went from being just, ‘oh, that's what porn stars do’ to that's what everyone does, and if you don't, there’s something wrong with you,” she said. “I don't think that would have happened really, at any other point in history, because we weren't consuming such vast quantities of images and videos in such rapid succession.” And fashion responded. Tom Ford (who clearly never disappoints) in 2007 put out another spicy set of imagery for his fragrance for men, shot by Terry Richardson: a transparent perfume bottle placed in front of a hairless vulva.

At this point, the only places pubes popped out were to provoke or seen as counter culture. In 2009, American Apparel featured porn star Sasha Grey bottomless and bush out, to sell their socks. Renowned for salacious ads, it even extended to in-person shopping when their Lower East Side New York location’s mannequins had their short and curlies front and center in the shop window.

Much like women revolted against gendered sartorial expectations of the ‘50s, the later 2010s brought the body positivity movement. “Not perfect, but that likely had an impact on people's perceptions and conversations around pubic hair,” Harrington said. Discussions of accepting all bodies regardless of shape, size, skin tone and with or without stretch marks also accommodated body hair. “I think the idea that bodies are fine as it would connect to less stigma around pubic hair, even if those conversations weren't directly connected,” she said.

The pandemic also brought this great relaxation of fashion and grooming that Harrington referred to as “casualization.” Edgy concepts and subcultures get pushed by the algorithms out of obscurity and into the mainstream. And while fashion is supporting whether it’s the aforementioned runway merkins or smaller intimate apparel brands like Cuccia featuring bush through their see-through panties, it’s safer to assume the greater culture of women decentering men and freeing themselves of catering to the male gaze is the culprit. (Although, DeFino’s survey shows a lot of men are enthusiastic about grass on the field.)

“I think there are certain [conversations] that were considered normal in the ‘90s that a lot of people would not stand for today, and one of them is that your pubic hair has to be trimmed, shaped or removed entirely,” Harrington said. Having hang ups about or criticizing others’ bodies à la Perez Hilton doesn’t hit the same as it did twenty years ago. Today, the body and bush shamers get shamed right back.

Rae Witte is a New York-based freelance journalist covering sex and dating, wellness, travel and the cross section of tech and culture. She has a Substack critiquing hotel pools and amenities. You can follow her work @raewitte.