Sara Blakely founded Spanx in Atlanta, Georgia, in 2000 with an initial investment of $5,000 from personal savings, producing footless pantyhose and shapewear that became a cultural phenomenon in American women's clothing. Within fifteen years, Spanx had become a billion-dollar company selling what were effectively modern corsets — garments designed to compress and reshape the body into a smoother, slimmer silhouette — under the contemporary language of 'control,' 'smoothing,' and 'confidence.' Blakely became the youngest self-made female billionaire in history.

Spanx attracted immediate feminist literary commentary as proof that the corset had simply been rebranded rather than abandoned — the same physical compression, the same cultural logic of the body requiring correction, now sold as self-improvement rather than social obligation. Poets and essayists including feminist bloggers and spoken-word artists produced extensive writing on Spanx as the corset's ghost. The company's cultural saturation made it a recurring contemporary reference in body-politics poetry.