You do see more unitards on the competition ice these days than you used to—in the years since the rule change, skaters like Fumie Suguri, Elene Gedevanishvili, and Yukari Nakano have memorably capitalized on their newfound wardrobe freedom in international competition. Still, as Nelken remembers, “Dick Button or whoever was commenting on skating at the time would always make a passing mention of it because it’s so unusual.”

The designer Brad Griffies, whose skating-outfit creations have been seen at every Winter Olympics since 2002 on the likes of Gracie Gold and Kimmie Meissner, has designed multiple unitards for Méité, including the one she wore for her skate in Pyeongchang last weekend. Still, he says, in total, he gets asked “maybe once or twice a year” to design a unitard or bodysuit.

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Talk to skating insiders and you’ll start to understand why wearing a unitard can feel like such a big risk. There’s no official ruling on when a woman can or should wear a bodysuit or a skirtless look in competition, but according to some within the sport, there are implicit rules for when a unitard is appropriate: First, your music choice has to be modern enough and upbeat enough to warrant one, and second, well—you have to look incredible in it.

“A really athletic piece of music could call for a unitard,” says Lorie Charbonneau, a veteran coach at the Figure Skating Club of Bloomington in Minnesota. Charbonneau has suggested unitards as wardrobe choices for some of her pupils, but mostly to small kids; she remembers suggesting a black unitard with hot pink accents once to a little girl skating to the Pink Panther theme.

“Most people who ask me for a unitard are skating to James Bond or something—something really rock ’n’ roll,” says Griffies, the designer. But “most people are skating to classical music, or to movie [scores],” he says. A 2014 rule change, however, means this year’s Olympics are the first in which skaters can skate to music with lyrics; Méité took advantage of that when she skated to a Beyoncé medley incorporating “Halo” and “Run the World (Girls).”

Beyond music selection, the other “rule” that dictates when a pant-leg silhouette is seen as acceptable is one that likely wouldn’t apply most anywhere else in sports: It has to look good. As Griffies, Gelecinskyj, and Charbonneau all told me, not everybody can pull off a unitard. If it’s ill-fitting, if it doesn’t suit the skater’s body type—basically, “unless it’s done very well,” as Gelecinskyj puts it — it will be considered by many to have been an ill-advised move. These concerns, it seems, take priority over whether a skater might feel more comfortable, more decent, or simply warmer in something other than a short dress.

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Just about everyone in figure skating would tell you that, in theory, the sport works like any other: It shouldn’t matter what you wear to do it, because what matters is whether you do it well. But for some, lurking behind that there’s an uneasy sense that pants or pant-like silhouettes might dull the “prettiness” of women’s figure skating.