There is a moment – just seconds into getting dressed – when I think I might panic. The hem of my stretchy top has got rolled up round my ribs before my head has popped out of the neck hole, and with my hands still stuck in the sleeves, I cannot reach round to pull it down. I wriggle helplessly for a minute, but the situation doesn’t improve; the band of rolled-up fabric is taut across my chest, immovable. That’s when I feel the first tingle of rising alarm – so familiar from early childhood – that comes of being trapped in your clothes.

I am trying, for the first time, to put on an item of shapewear for men – an ordinary-looking, highly elasticated long-sleeved workout top that will, I hope, give me the instant slim profile of someone who goes to the gym regularly, instead of not since the pandemic started.

Eventually, after a few breathtaking contortions, I find myself dressed and, shall we say, gathered. On forums where men discuss ways to reduce your silhouette through the application of shapewear, people often suggest buying this sort of top, only one size too small. If I had done that I’d still be lying on the bedroom floor with it stuck halfway over my head.

Technically, the top I’m wearing doesn’t even qualify as shapewear – it’s popularly known as “compression wear”, an elasticated sub-genre of athletic clothing that is meant to enhance performance by improving blood flow to your muscles, or something. There is very little evidence for this – a recent study showed no significant performance improvement in runners wearing compression garments – but they can also be very slimming, which may well be the actual source of their popularity. It’s certainly not because they’re comfortable.

Male shapewear has been the next big thing for a long time. Back in 2010, Marks & Spencer started selling Bodymax pants with a stretchy frontal area that was said to offer subtle enhancement, like a codpiece. In the same year the shapewear giant Spanx launched Spanx for Men.

Spanx relaunched its men’s shapewear line in 2021, and again in 2024, but today their website offers no male shapewear at all. Meanwhile, M&S has just launched a new line of enhancing men’s pants with a trademarked feature called Secret Support. This turns out to be a front pouch akin to a little bra cup, and it’s secret enough that I wore the pants for a whole day without realising it was there. The marketing for men’s shapewear is sometimes characterised by a suffocating coyness.

In 2023, Kim Kardashian’s brand Skims – the biggest name in shapewear – launched a men’s line of its own, but it contained nothing you could really describe as shapewear. In fact, it was mostly the opposite: slouchy trousers, loose T-shirts and hoodies. Back then, Kardashian told GQ that Skims shapewear for men was on the way, “but we’re not launching with that”. Almost three years later, it still hasn’t arrived. It’s tempting to draw the conclusion that while it’s easy to generate publicity around men’s shapewear, it’s rather harder to sell it to men.

“I don’t think shapewear for men really exists yet,” says Zak Maoui, UK Esquire magazine’s style director, although he’s not including compression wear like my top in his definition.

“When I think of shapewear I think of specific clothing that is designed to bring elements of the body in,” he says. But when it comes to making it for men, he’s also not sure what everybody’s waiting for. “I think anything that helps people feel better about themselves is good.”

There are, for the moment, plenty of smaller players out there. According to the commerce intelligence publisher ShelfTrend, several niche brands – including Esteem Apparel, TAILONG and QORE Logiq – have built seven-figure businesses selling their wares through Amazon, as online searches for “male shapewear” increased 40% from 2024 to 2025.

The idea of male shapewear as a market still waiting its turn for takeoff is based largely on its enormous potential for growth. Shapewear itself is huge – a $3bn (£2.2bn) annual market that is projected to reach $4.3bn by 2030 – Skims alone expects to top $1bn in sales this year, and the company is now valued at $5bn. But male shapewear accounted for less than 7% of the overall market in 2024.

For one UK online retailer, however, that percentage is now more like 30%. “We’ve gone from say, four years ago, when we may have had two products in a couple of colours, to where we’ve now got six or eight,” says Shane Rogers, head of creative at The London Corset Company. “We’re thinking about manufacturing our own, because we can’t get the quantities we want, or get what we want in the styles we want.” The London Corset Company imports male shapewear products from all over the world, including from South America, a centre of innovation for modern shapewear (the Colombian shapewear brand Leonisa has its own men’s collection, called Leo).

To be fair, it does seem that a lot of men’s shapewear is still masquerading – or at least performing double service – as compression wear. Projections that include both shapewear and compression wear estimate the market will reach $8bn by 2030, so the distinction may soon become meaningless. As Rogers says: “Anything that squeezes you is compression, basically.”

Whatever the name, we’re talking about the same technology: the extreme and persistent stretchiness found in female shapewear and male compression wear results from the strategic application of elastane, the polyether-polyurea copolymer invented by DuPont in 1958 and better known as either Lycra – a brand name – or spandex, which sounds like a brand name but isn’t. If there’s a true difference between compression wear and shapewear it probably lies in amounts: my panic-inducing compression top is 16% elastane. A Skims core sculpt waist cincher for women is 39%.

If you search for it online you will soon find plenty of male shapewear that goes beyond snug-fitting gym clothes – there are high-waisted girdles and thigh-reducing leggings. There are pants with discreet padding in the rear, and compression tops designed to correct your posture as well as your belly. There are shirts with big biceps already sewn in to them, and all-in-one girdles that look like shortie wetsuits.

On the second morning of my shapewear journey I try on a very tight tank top with an additional panel that pulls across your belly and is fastened with a row of hooks and eyes. Again, the day begins with a struggle – it takes a long time and a fair bit of strength to do up all 10 hooks. Once I’m in, I feel not so much sculpted as encased, like sausage meat in a skin. I spend the rest of the day slightly short of breath. By 4pm, I can’t stand it any more. This is perhaps the best thing I can say about shapewear: it feels good to take it off.

Shapewear for men is nothing new – the US brand Underworks has been selling it for almost three decades – in fact, the idea has been with us from long before the advent of elastane.

“People have been wearing corrective devices for centuries,” says Dr Alun Withey, the author of Technology, Self-Fashioning and Politeness in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Refined Bodies. “But I would argue that the 18th century is the first time it’s not just about, for want of a better term, curing deformity. It’s about trying to force your body into a shape that is socially desirable.”

The ideal form was a “natural” one, although this had little to do with the muscular figure of those living close to the land.

“The body of the polite gentleman is slighter – it’s about showing that you don’t work,” says Withey. “You are delicate, but that’s not to say skinny and weak. The ideal posture would be that of a dancer or a fencer.” Things are not so different today – shapewear isn’t trying to fix you, but make your body conform to a shifting stereotype.

In the 18th century, the big technological innovation in male foundational garments was steel. “One group of products are steel backs,” says Withey. “You’d strap it to yourself before you put your shirt on, and because it’s got a steel plate, it forces you to stand straight.” Other devices included a hidden steel collar to keep your chin from dropping. “So above and beyond corrective, that’s forcing you into a socially pleasing form.”

With practice, climbing in and out of my compression top gets a bit easier, but I don’t think I could bring myself to wear it out on its own – certainly not to the gym – and I don’t think it’s doing me any favours hidden under my regular clothes. In any case, I’m not sure I’d ever get used to going about my daily business while shrink-wrapped.

But while compression wear is basically a jogging top with side benefits, actual shapewear has any number of specific applications: some of it is post-surgical; some men who’ve lost a lot of weight use it to keep excess skin supported during exercise; others use it to minimise gynaecomastia (man boobs). Increasingly, however, it is for men who just want to look slimmer, if only for a night.

“I can’t make a 20 stone guy look 10 stone or anything,” says Rogers. “But if you go to a wedding and you want your suit to look good – as long as your suit fitted you originally – they are effective.”

It remains a bit of a mystery why the bigger players, including Skims, haven’t jumped into the market with both feet. “What do they know about the shapewear for men industry that we don’t, that’s stopping them?” says Maoui.

There could also be a simple explanation why the explosion in men’s shapewear, so often heralded, never quite seems to arrive.

“Nobody wants to admit to wearing it, really, do they?” says Withey. “If the purpose is to hide your protruding belly, you don’t want to tell people you’re doing it.”