What it was: Trim-Jeans, a device that combined sweaty plastic and delusional faith in science into one ingenious package. Also known as sauna pants, they were dubbed "The Amazing Space Age Slenderizer," suggesting that NASA had come up with the device to help astronauts slim down. For heaven's sake, we had to grease the frame of the Mercury capsule door to get John Glenn in there. They weren't jeans in any possible sense of the word. They looked like an incontinence aid from a 1970s English sci-fi show.
How it supposedly worked: You put on the vinyl pants, wincing at the feel of processed petrochemical products on your skin. You pumped them up like a blood-pressure cuff. Then you did special exercises, such as the Magic Torso Movements (also known as situps). From the sound of the testimonials, this made the pounds melt off with such horrifying rapidity that users started to fear they would dissolve away to nothing if they couldn't get this wretched thing off. Really. It was GUARANTEED TO REDUCE YOUR WAIST, TUMMY, HIPS AND THIGHS A TOTAL OF FROM 6 TO 9 INCHES IN JUST 3 DAYS. Nine inches. Gone. In 72 hours? Quicklime doesn't work that fast. The fine print indicated you could use the Trim-Jeans for a few minutes a day for three days, then a few times a week, then twice a month, to keep off the pounds. Yes, if you eat an entire cheesecake, a few minutes of grunting in puffed-up vinyl underwear every fortnight should take care of it.
What was its lasting effect? Trim-Jeans might be forgotten today if they hadn't been immortalized in a Monty Python sketch, Trim-Jeans Theatre, where great plays such as "Long Day's Journey Into Night While the Inches Melt Away" are performed by actors in Trim-Jeans. The sketch also reveals the color of the pants: jaundiced gold.
Cost: $13.95. And they came with a FULL MONEY-BACK GUARANTEE. But that was in 1971.
