International Courant
On the 2024 Oscars on Sunday, John Cena took the stage — seemingly in his birthday swimsuit save for a winner’s envelope and a few Birkenstocks — to current the award for greatest costume design. However the wrestler-turned-actor was really carrying an merchandise known as a modesty garment, usually utilized in movie and tv to cowl an actor’s intimate areas.
Donning the flesh-colored sling as a part of a skit that nodded to streaker Robert Opel on the 1974 Academy Awards, Cena was given a curtain-toga to cowl up throughout costume designer Holly Waddington’s acceptance speech for Poor Issues.
Whereas the bit a few fashionable actor’s bits acquired its share of guffaws, the query stays: What’s a modesty garment, or modesty pouch, anyway?
Jessica Steinrock, one of many main intimacy coordinators in Hollywood and CEO of Intimacy Administrators and Coordinators, Inc., tells The Hollywood Reporter that there are often two varieties. One resembles a coin purse or drawstring bag, and the opposite seems to be like a strapless thong that’s hooked up with a bit little bit of adhesive within the entrance and the again. The latter is what Cena wore on the Oscars stage, a flesh-colored pocket sans straps that coated his back and front areas.
Steinrock says there are a number of corporations that make modesty pouches. One firm, Covvier, was launched in September 2022, because the demand for such specifically designed clothes rose together with the presence of intimacy coordinators on units because the #MeToo period. Lucia Shapiro, Covvier co-founder and set costumer on Emmy-winning TV reveals, says that whereas Cena didn’t don one among their firm’s merchandise, that are produced from nylon, spandex and lined with neoprene (to behave as a barrier between actors throughout intercourse scenes), he seems to be to be carrying a garment crammed with a tender cup mould, hooked up to his pores and skin with an adhesive like High Stick, a males’s toupé grooming tape utilized by wardrobe departments to stick material to pores and skin.
Steinrock explains that these clothes are created to match the actor’s pores and skin tone. “Having variety in dimension and pores and skin tone is admittedly vital,” she provides. Intimacy coordinators have extra just lately began collaborating with costume and hair and make-up departments to additional “prioritize actor care and actor dignity,” says Steinrock.
Even earlier than intimacy clothes grew to become extra of a staple, Shapiro says the trade has at all times labored to guard actors throughout intimate scenes, from utilizing fishing wire as an alternative of seen straps with common underwear, to including shoe insoles or a part of a plushy costume inside underwear.
She notes, “(HBO’s) The Deuce was the primary time that it was like, ‘We’re gonna put one thing in between these actors different than simply this flimsy piece of cloth.'”
Shapiro tells THR that the demand for these intimate clothes has been unprecedented because the actors and writers strikes ended on the finish of final 12 months — a lot in order that they’re bought out of a number of merchandise. “It is nice that the tradition round intercourse in movie is altering,” she says. “We’re in a position to assist and that we’re promoting out of every thing as a result of that simply implies that it is getting into a greater path.”
Representatives for Cena and The Academy of Movement Image Arts and Sciences haven’t but responded to THR’s requests to elaborate on this scant ensemble.
