From Coachella to St Kilda: what is the duct tape bikini?

There seem to be only three topics animating our colleagues today: the Australian election, Game of Thrones and duct tape fashion. I’ve read too much about the first two. Please explain the third.

You know how you see certain fashions on the catwalk and you think, “WHAT? Surely nobody has any use for that in the real world?” (The tiny handbag comes to mind. In fact, so does the huge one.)

Well, one extremely brave journalist decided to try out the latest high fashion craze: duct tape bikinis.

Duct tape what-nows?

Feature during New York fashion week last year, the trend involves sticking tape to your skin where a bikini might usually fit. Since then, people have been Instagramming photos of themselves at pool parties and Coachella, wearing sparkly tape instead of clothes.

Oh jeez. Removal would be nightmarish.

While duct tape has been used on runways since time immemorial (or at least since 2017, according to the six seconds I was prepared to spend googling), applying it to your pubic line appears to be new – and it’s the sort of thing only a woman has the pain tolerance to try.

If there are men having a crack at it, the photos are being removed by Instagram extremely quickly. It’s probably for the best.

Tell me what happened to this poor journalist?

Deni Kirkova got sent by the UK newspaper the Sun to Australia’s least glamorous beach, St Kilda in Melbourne, where it sounds like she had to cut up tape and apply it herself in the public bathroom. Australia got wind of the story this morning, when News.com.au republished it.

It turns out the tape is not practical for the beach, with wind, water, sand and inquiring seagulls being major impediments to the glue. “A gust of wind whipped off some bits of tape,” Kirkova said. And while fighting off some seagulls for the fish and chips she was trying to eat, “the movement of my neck and torso meant the tape started to flap about freely”.

One Twitter wit called the excursion “Hitchcock’s The Birds for the influencer generation”.

Is it just normal duct tape? Because thrifty if so.

Of course not. The last Instagram craze we wrote about was the watermelon ham; it took three days to turn a delicious, fresh watermelon into a product that tasted like dirty moist socks. This is not a world that deals in thrifty or practical.

A reader has pointed out that the tape bikini has roots in the favelas of Rio, Brazil, where women began to use it to perfect tanning lines (it features in this 2017 clip of Anitta song Vai Malandra). It was recently popularised by a Miami designer called Joel Alvarez, who owns a business called The Black Tape project – which appears to sell “body” tape in every colour other than black, for about A$43 for a nine-metre roll.

Lol of course a man is profiting from it. Meanwhile, you can get 20m of silver tape for $11 at hardware store Bunnings …

Yes – but according to two sales reps we called, you probably shouldn’t. Yasi from the paint desk at a Sydney Bunnings was particularly wary.

“It’s the outside that’s waterproof, not the glue. Swimming around in it would upset the glue and being under the sun would make the glue gooey and melty and hard to get off. There’d be sand issues, a lot of stickage to the edges,” she warned. “You’d need baby oil to get it off – but it wouldn’t wax you or anything.”

The tape sold by Alvarez comes with a similar warning: “Unfortunately, the tape is not waterproof and will come off in water or excessive sweat.”

This sounds a lot like Deni’s experience. Is Yasi at Bunnings getting much interest?

She said she hadn’t fielded too many questions about the application of duct tape to the body. “But I have had a couple of people ask for very specific tape recently – matte black tape for some reason? I don’t know what that’s about.”

Is this trend going to stick?

It won’t hold water, if you ask me.

• Gabrielle Jackson answered Steph Harmon’s questions

• This article was amended on 20 May. The trend has roots in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.