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What Lies Beneath: How Lingerie Got Sexy!
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Bhavesh Parmar
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Dec 01, 2016
There is a moment in a woman’s life when she must graduate from mere underwear to lingerie—from the white cotton undershirts and briefs of girlhood to those structured, stuffed, elasticized contraptions that lift and hold and wrangle and enhance and protect her rapidly changing body.
I did not want to wear a bra, had clung to my eyelet-trimmed Fruit of the Loom camisoles for probably too long before my mother dragged me to Victoria’s Secret to have a stranger measure and appraise my bust. She picked out a slightly padded, flesh-toned brassiere that I could barely bring myself to try on. Because, you know, a bra isn’t just a bra. It’s the first step toward adulthood, the first admission of one’s sexual identity. A first bra is at once humiliating and titillating, terrifying and exciting, mysterious yet somehow utterly banal. It’s surrendering to the expectations of being a woman, but also to its pleasures.
These pleasures—and pains—are laid bare in Exposed: A History of Lingerie, a new exhibition that runs through November 15 at the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. “Lingerie is a tricky subject,” says the show’s curator Colleen Hill, who also wrote the equally seductive accompanying catalog, which Yale University Press will publish in July. “Even today you have some women who really hate the idea of these seemingly oppressive underwire push-up bras or corsets and then other women who fully embrace them.… But looking at these garments says so much about the history of fashion, and how lingerie was working simultaneously with outerwear, with women’s lib, with all these social changes.”
Drawing from the museum’s vast collection, which includes some 500 lingerie items dating from the 18th century to the present, Exposed features more than 70 pieces tracing the development of intimate apparel from the chemise to the thong, the corset to the Wonderbra, the tea gown to the pajama pant—as well as its place in fashion and culture.
The idea that underthings can serve any other purpose besides a purely functional one, of course, is relatively new. For centuries, men and women wore plain T-shaped linen tunics under their clothes, most likely for warmth and, as FIT Museum Director Valerie Steele writes in the catalog’s forward, to protect more decorative outer garments from “the dirt and sweat associated with the (seldom washed) body.” (Eww.) Undergarments did enjoy a brief moment of exposure in the 18th century, with the ruling class indulging in decorative corsets. (Think Marie Antoinette and her semi-public dressing rituals.) Yet by the early 19th century, the rise of the middle class—and a certain “bourgeois modesty”—sent these undergarments back into hiding, with women relegated to simple, white stays and petticoats that served to enhance their virtue rather than their allure.
