“The idea of how you go to the bathroom, how you pee when you wear it, at the beginning was the big issue,” says Kamali. She recalls that people insisted they could not wear bodysuits, because they could not go to the bathroom. People demanded that she add snaps to the crotch of her designs, to facilitate peeing. She tried it but found that “the snaps are more uncomfortable than figuring out how to go to the bathroom.” Instead, Kamali’s bodysuits use fusible stretch elastic around the legs to make them easier to remove. “Putting snaps at your crotch, excuse me-it doesn’t make sense,” she says.
In fact, Kamali is adamant that if you even need to ask how to pee in a bodysuit, you already have your answer. “The people who need to be told how to pee shouldn’t be wearing a bodysuit,” she says. “You should forget it-it’s not for you, don’t worry about it. Wear a top. Do something else.”
A person who truly belongs in a bodysuit, says Kamali, does not think about the bathroom. That person thinks, I’ll figure it out. I want to wear this bodysuit, I don’t need anyone telling me how to pee. If you’re preoccupied by pee, says Kamali, “just don’t buy ’em. It’s not your lifestyle.”
Feeling gently negged by this advice, I tried Brucker, who works as a personal stylist. Her advice is simple: “Unsnap it, use the restroom, snap it back, pull on your bottoms.” Brucker acknowledges that snapping and re-snapping is easier said than done.
“When you’re in a rush to get back out somewhere and you’re fussing with the snaps to get them back on, I find that challenging,” she says. “It’s like when you’re in a rush and you’re trying to put the key in a key hole.” Indeed, as Shakespeare puts it, there’s the rub. Brucker says that some women put a leg up on the toilet or braced against the wall to make re-snapping easier.
What about the option of pulling the crotch tab to the side? “If you’re in a rush, and time is of the essence, pull to the side!” says Brucker. “But you do run the risk of peeing on your hand…of having a little spillage, if you will.”
Now, what about the final, nuclear option-simply yanking the entire thing down? “It’s not like it’s a wet bathing suit where it’s going to be impossible to pull it back up again, so it really is just a matter of what bottoms do you have, what kind of bathroom floor are you in,” Brucker says. At work or in a dirty bar, it might be better to use options one or two. But Brucker notes that bodysuit wearers who strip all the way down are in good company.
“J.Lo has to do it too!” she says. “When I think of J.Lo in a bodysuit, I’m like, ‘She’s also snapping and re-snapping with her pants around her ankles when she’s in the bathroom!'” And it’s so true –we often seen J.Lo rocking a skintight bodysuit or voluminous jumpsuit on the red carpet. It is comforting to know that she also, later, feels the cool breeze of bathroom air over her entire body. In that sense, we’re all in solidarity.
Despite these indignities, Brucker points out that we’re not chumps for wearing bodysuits. “The positive is that once you get it snapped and pull your pants up your outfit is solidly constructed and put together, you don’t have to worry about needing to re-tuck and shift.” Kamali agrees that the bodysuit has endured because it’s a piece that makes its wearer feel powerful. “So much of what we like to wear is because we feel good in it,” she says. “The bodysuit feels good on, and you don’t have to think of it.” And that’s final.
Until you’re in the bathroom stall, that is. And then you can just think of J.Lo.
Jenny Singer is a staff writer for Glamour. You can follow her on Twitter.
This story originally appeared on Glamour U.S.