Zentai: The Full-Body Suit That Erases a Face

Zentai (ゼンタイ) is short for the Japanese zenshin taitsu (全身タイツ), full-body tights. It is a one-piece suit that covers a person from head to foot. Most are high-stretch spandex, Lycra, or nylon. Some are latex. What sets it apart is a sealed hood built into the suit. The hood takes the face, the hair, the expression, and the ordinary signs of who the wearer is. Color, shine, and an outline are what remain.

In a kink room

In BDSM and fetish play the suit takes identity off the person in it. Color, gloss, and contour are what you see: a sculpture of a body, or an object with no face. With the face gone, shame drops for a lot of wearers. Anonymity goes up, and with it a stronger feeling of being given over. The fabric is tight on the whole skin, a second skin, pressure spread evenly. The hood filters what the wearer can see and the sound of their breathing, so attention draws back onto the breath and onto sensation inside the suit. Players use it for dollification, for a faceless servant or human furniture, for pet play, and for fetish photos that keep the face anonymous.

Green Men, a Super Bowl stage, retail suits

The same outline later showed up in ordinary public view. In sport, the case people cite is The Green Men, two Vancouver Canucks fans in the NHL. Dance crews use the suits for street performance. Video work uses them for chroma-key, a colored body that can be keyed out of the shot. The Black Eyed Peas wore them in the “Boom Boom Pow” video and on a Super Bowl stage. Shops then sold the look on its own. Morphsuits in the United Kingdom, and RootSuit and Superfan Suits in the United States, pushed it into retail. Chasing a general customer, some of those brands have publicly kept their distance from the underground zentai fetish community. Morphsuits is the brand the record names for that distancing. A suit on a stage is still the same full-body outline.

The fine, the air, and the heat

A sealed hood hides the face, and public wear runs into the law. In France, and in other places with rules against covering the face, wearing a fully closed hood in public can mean a fine of up to €150. Some large stadiums also ban entry in a mask. Check the local rule before a sealed hood goes into a street or a venue.

Breathing is the line that does not move. The fabric over the mouth and nose has to vent — a micro-mesh is the usual answer — or the people involved agree in advance on breaks when the hood comes off. Do not put a gag or tape inside a sealed hood. Do not mix that hood with choking, a plastic bag, or any other breath play.

If the scene also ties the wearer, an alert spotter who is not in a zentai stays in the room, with safety shears that can cut the zipper and the fabric at once. Sealed synthetic under spotlights, in a closed room, or at an event lets heat out very slowly. Dehydration, a racing heart, and heatstroke are the risk, so keep water there and cap how long the suit stays on. Before anyone gets in, agree whether the eyes can see or the hood is blind, and how the wearer will get the suit off to use the toilet.