A rival nude-inspired bikini crafted to make its wearer look au naturel has made one Chicago-area small business owner worried that her provocative product has been duplicated.
When billionaire cosmetic mogul and reality TV star Kylie Jenner posted a photo on Instagram of herself in a pseudo-nipple bikini on Monday, Linze Rice’s phone started buzzing nonstop. Friends were congratulating her; Jenner-Kardashian fans were tagging Rice’s small business on Jenner’s Instagram post.
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The most-followed woman on Instagram had just shared a selfie vaunting Rice’s product, The TaTa Top. So it seemed.
Then Rice swiped right. In the next photo, she saw that Jenner had tagged famous French designer Jean Paul Gaultier and Rice realized that he had created a nipple bikini that looked strikingly similar to hers.
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“It was panic. It was like, ‘Are they just about to crush me?’” the Berwyn resident said. “Why couldn’t that have been me?”
The two tops share much in common. They feature classic triangular cuts. They use thin, stringy straps. And, notably, they both depict flesh-tone breasts to give the illusion the wearer is topless.
“There’s no denying that, putting those two products side by side, they look very alike,” Rice, 33, told the Tribune of the French designer’s version of the swimsuit. It’s not the first time Gaultier has designed nude-inspired clothing.
Jenner’s post has already received more than 12 million likes. Approximately 346 million people — about as many as live in the United States — follow her account. The post has generated dozens of articles from well-read news publications, many of which point readers to Gaultier’s online storefront.
The previous owners of The TaTa Top reached out to a manager for Jenner and her celebrity sister Kendall in 2015, sharing their product and suggesting it could help “free the nipple” and challenge “dated societal norms,” according to an email Rice shared with the Tribune.
“Very unique and funny but unfortunately not something that any of the girls can participate in,” the manager responded. If someone in the Jenner and Kardashian’s organization changed their mind, they didn’t keep The TaTa Top abreast. Rice said she has never heard from the famous family and their representatives.
Jenner has been accused of plagiarizing other designers’ work before in her own product lines. Gaultier’s fashion label and a representative for Jenner did not respond to emails the Tribune sent requesting comments.
Her bikini post Monday was captioned “free the nipple.” Rice called the post “frustrating, disheartening, demoralizing.”
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“It makes me want to blast off into space and leave this world behind. It’s overwhelming,” said Rice, who hasn’t made any money off The TaTa Top since purchasing the business in 2018.
Rice says her passion for the company has made her “the boob girl” among friends. She’s been gifted a necklace, a plant pot and even a crocheted-rug with breasts depicted on them. Her work represents a chance to fight for what she believes in.
“The laws that dictate a man’s and a woman’s body are extremely discriminatory. You can’t say that one sex can do something that the other sex can’t,” she said
She hopes her product, even in its novelty, can push discussions about sex and gender along and maybe help people feel good about the bodies they’re in along the way.
Challenges to cultural norms can gain momentum from shocking, novel items like the The TaTa Top, according to Ashlee Humphreys, a Northwestern University integrated marketing communications professor. Things need to happen to start conversations before broadly held beliefs can change, she said.
“It’s a first and preliminary step toward changing norms,” said Humphreys, whose research has focused on opinions about controversial practices like gambling and marijuana use. It could be hard to change American standards on nudity because the laws governing nudity here are so clearly established, she added.
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Still, the The TaTa Top’s lighthearted disregard for nudity laws would garner attention well on social media, where playfulness is rewarded, Humphreys said.
When Michelle and Robyn Lytle started The TaTa Top in 2014, they too set out to challenge gender norms, Rice said. They were particularly perturbed by Chicago laws that allow men, but not women, to go topless at the beach, so they designed the eye-catching swimsuit.
Rice is a former reporter and she covered the company while working for now-defunct DNAinfo. When her newsroom shut down, she felt like she needed new purpose in life. Then she saw that the Lytles were selling their bikini company.
“We took a big piece of our life savings and bought the business,” Rice said. She still hasn’t paid herself yet. All the businesses profits have been reinvested into new products, she said, and the company donates $3 to charities for every $35 bikini top sold.
She said, to date, the company has donated over $46,000 to women- and breast cancer-focused charities Keep A Breast and Chicago Women’s Health Center.
Rice said a tag in Jenner’s Instagram post would have made a huge impact not only to her small business, but to the charities it supports.
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The business has quasi-naked clothing for everyone. Their tops come in three shades—light, medium and dark—and various sizes. They sell flesh-tone bikini bottoms, too.
One-piece bathing suits with the business’s particular motif should be added to the online store this week, Rice said.
The Lytles secured a patent for a triangle-cut, string strap bikini that mimics breasts when they started the company, which Rice uses now.
Rice would like Jenner to share her swimsuit on her Instagram account, and would ask Gaultier or Jenner to make a donation to Keep A Breast or the Chicago Women’s Health Center, too.
While Gaultier’s site shows his $150 top sold out in all sizes, Rice said her store, which can be found at thetatatop.com, has plenty of anatomically analogous attire in stock and more on the way.
“If you want the poor man’s Gaultier, come here,” she said.
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Twitter @jakesheridan_
