the new underwear dichotomy
By alice | January 28, 2010
Belle shows her box of family photos to a friend who has just been swimming
Gok Wan of How To Look Good Naked (which should really be called How To Stop Hating Your Body And Just Be Beautiful) says this: all women need two types of underwear, attractive bedroom underwear, and magic reinforced-bodyshaping underwear. You can’t really argue with Gok because he is such a nice man, but my gripe is really with the whole underwear industry rather than Gok, and it is this: what is wrong with just the one type of underwear, both supportive and nice-looking at the same time? Wouldn’t Nice Yet Effective lower layers be much better than split-personality-disorder chopping and changing, not to mention saving half of our underwear budgets? (Saving money is not everything, but some of us are trying to have a recession around here while we still can. Thank you.)
The main thing that baffles me is our new willingness to go around squished up, which is basically not very comfortable, and oddly reminiscent of days gone by, before Women’s Lib was invented. Many people have now forgotten this, but once upon a time, when I was a little girl, there was a mythical feminist fashion called “burning your bra”. I never knew anyone who ever actually did this, admittedly, but it occurs in the French Art Film about a housewife-turned-Lady of the Night (or rather, due to her marital commitments, a Lady of the Afternoon Between 2pm And 5pm). Belle de Jour At some point I forget, feeling ambivalent about her new hobby, Belle removes her undies and plunges them into the roaring fireplace. As a metaphor it’s quite confusing and probably not feminist at all, but the point is, the sort of underwear women wore in those days was often quite restrictive and uncomfortable, rather like the modern support-bandage corsetry, and people thought it quite natural to get fed up with all of that and suddenly break out and do whatever you liked instead. Even if what you liked included going about with a slightly plumpish tummy. And for many years, this did not seem like a very big deal, but finally the old restrictive undergarments came back, and not because no decent man would marry an uncorseted young maiden- just because women wanted to look more shapely. Early feminists must be turning in their graves!
Also I am not sure how one is supposed to get the magic pants off and replace them with the pretty flouncy things in between the evening-out and the bedroom. Not only would this take quite a long visit to the dressing room, involving totally removing then replacing your entire outfit, but surely any chap-in-question would notice the appearance of sudden extra wobbly bits and wonder what was going on? Admittedly, men tend to be a lot less bothered by small amounts of flab on a woman than women are. So perhaps magic pants are more for ladies’ vanity than for alluring the opposite sex. But still, why not make underwear that satisfies vanity in terms of both support and aesthetics?
I’m not against magic pants- no reason why we can’t squeeze ourselves in if we feel like it, in my view. I just think there should be prettier ways of doing so than superthick tights that go all the way to your armpits, and the like. For instance, these days, wedding dresses seem to consist entirely of Victorian underwear- a corset with many petticoat skirts attached- (I know, I’ve been watching this show). This sort of thing was of course originally designed to shape the body in the desired way, and it still does that. Brides will pay a lot of money to look their best. So, why can’t the reverse also happen- with undergarments looking nice as well as doing the supporting? Why can’t some of the pretty designery underwear get treated to a bit more lycra- does it all have to be designed for size zero teens with no chests? It’s silly.
Me, I’m too lazy to make myself uncomfortable on purpose, for any reason of mere appearance, with the single exception of high heels, in the very limited cases of only needing to walk from the car to my seat inside the building- enough suffering for any woman, surely. But if I were ever tempted into shape-wear, it would need to look (a) not extremely hot (this is Texas) and (b) less medical. However, the girls in Belle de Jour are clearly reinforced- you can see how pointy they are even when fully dressed- and their whole job is to look good sans dresses. Well, not their whole job. You know what I mean. But a significant part of it. So I think we can learn from the example of Belle de Jour’s clothing department, and stop forcing women to live the modern divided life of double underwear identity!
This is the trouble with fashion, it tells us what to do and makes us think we wanted it when we didn’t. Funnily enough, the Buñuel film has something to say about that sort of behaviour too… but I can’t go into that, this post has gone on for long enough already. Goodnight!
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