her in a sheer white leotard modeling various poses. Her sandy hair is loose, her nipples slightly visible, and her body pristine. In a few photos, she spreads her legs wide to the camera, holding the soles of her feet in her hands. Her expression is blank and confident; there’s a diamond on her left ring finger. One chapter of the book is called, simply, “Sex.”
It wasn’t until the turn of the century that Bach’s instructors started defecting. By that point, the Lotte Berk Method had gotten fusty. A 2005 piece in The Observer called it the “35-year-old Margo Channing of New York City fitness programs,” and observed that it was “under siege by a fresh young Eve Harrington of exercise called Core Fusion, founded in 2002 by two former Berk instructors.” Core Fusion, the offshoot, had adapted to the demands of the market. It was fancier, prettier, and more welcoming. The facilities were brighter, and everything smelled good. Hundreds of Bach’s customers made the switch. Soon afterward, more Lotte Berk instructors left and founded their own studios, including Physique 57 and the Bar Method, which became two popular chains.
Around 2010, barre hit a boom period. A Times trend piece noted that the classes had developed a cult following for helping women “replicate the dancer’s enviable body: long and lean, svelte but not bulky.” Another Times trend piece, from 2011, began with the same angle, which is barre’s primary sales pitch—giving you a body that gets its own results. “Women have long coveted sinewy arms, high and tight derrieres, lean legs and a regal posture. Now, in search of this shape, many of them are ditching yoga and Pilates and lining up at the ballet barre.” One woman testified: “Every single inch of me has changed.” One got to the point, jokingly, by saying, “Everything is engaged. Except me. Yet.”
Today, barre has become a nationwide fixture. Sprinkled all across our sprawling land are thousands of basically identical mirrored rooms containing identically dressed women doing the exact same movements on the exact same hourly timer in pursuit of their own particular genetic inflection of the exact same “ballet body.” The biggest franchise, Pure Barre, operates more than five hundred locations, with studios in Henderson, Nevada, and Rochester, Minnesota, and Owensboro, Kentucky; there are twelve Pure Barre studios in Manhattan and Brooklyn alone.
The rise of barre is unparalleled in a few aspects: as far as exercise methods go, nothing this expensive and this uniform has gone this big. Hot yoga and Pilates are both ubiquitous, but the pursuits have expanded at the level of individual studios rather than nationwide chains. (Yoga classes also mostly hover around $20 or less, where barre, if you pay full price, often costs double that.) Boutique spin classes are comparable—they got popular when barre did, and they are similarly expensive. But SoulCycle, the biggest chain, operates just seventy-five locations nationwide, and you won’t find it in Owensboro. Among hundreds of thousands of women in dramatically different political and cultural environments, there seems to be an easy agreement that barre is worth it—that spending sixty cents per minute to have an instructor tell you to move your leg around in one-inch increments is a self-evidently worthwhile pursuit.
In grad school, driving out past the Chili’s to the Pure Barre, I became a believer. I had been primed, first with my girlishly regimented physical training—dance, gymnastics, cheerleading—and then with yoga, my therapeutic on-ramp to the thing I was slowly realizing, which was that you could, without obvious negative consequences, control the way your body felt on the inside and worked on the outside by paying people to give you orders in a small, mirrored room. Barre was much too expensive for my grad school budget, but I kept paying for it. It seemed, very obviously, like an investment in a more functional life.
Was it health I was investing in? In a very narrow way, it was. Barre has made me stronger and improved my posture. It has given me the luxury—which is off-limits to so many people, for so many stupid reasons—of not having to think about my body, because it mostly feels good, mostly works. But the endurance that barre builds is possibly more psychological than physical. What it’s really good at is getting you in shape for a hyper-accelerated capitalist life. It prepares you less for a half marathon than for a twelve-hour workday, or a week alone with a kid and no childcare, or an