No tribal society, unless it has been infiltrated by concepts of western dress, appears to have garments that could be considered as underwear: items of clothing that act as a layer of insulation between the skin of the body and its outer garments. The anthropologist Ted Polhemus uses the example of the loincloth, which is a garment at once in direct contact with the wearer's genitals but at the same time open to the public gaze.
He postulates that this intimacy is allowable in small established communities where everything is known of the participants, unlike the rituals followed in larger, more industrialized, and thus anonymous societies. It is only when the cultural notion of privacy is apparent that underwear can perform its ritualistic function of shielding the body from the open scrutiny of others. It was in ancient Egypt that the concept of having a second layer of clothing between the skin and the outer, more decoratively embellished layer of dress was devised.
At that time the inner layer was worn more as a status symbol than for any erotic or practical reasons. In Europe and North America underwear appears to have developed in range and complexity as the sight of a naked body moves from being an everyday public occurrence to a social taboo, and codes of acceptable social etiquette and civility deem the naked body private.
Strategies come into play to make the body respectable, and underwear thus achieves its primary role, to shield the sexual zones of the body from the gaze of others. Up to the nineteenth century underwear in Europe and North America had two main functions: to protect expensive outer garments from the dirt of the body beneath, as bathing for most was an expensive and time-consuming luxury, and to add an extra layer of insulation.
The first items of underwear were unisex and classless linen shifts with no particular erotic connotations. By the nineteenth century, however, the notion of underwear began to change as fashion became more inherently gendered. Underwear remained practical and functional for men, with cotton being the staple material, but for women it became an erotic exoskeleton helping to achieve the fashionable silhouette by constraining the body and coding certain parts as sexual.
The corset, for instance, derived from the cotte of the s, a rigid laced tunic of linen, became a device used to compress the waist while simultaneously drawing attention to the breasts and hips.
This leads to the inherent tension in the nature of underwear: it conceals but simultaneously reveals the erogenous zones of the body. Adam and Eve may have modestly covered their genitals with fig leaves, but by doing so, they drew attention to the sexual parts of their bodies.
The bra, for instance, supports the breasts but at the same time creates a cleavage, an entirely invented erogenous zone that exists only as a result of the underwear that creates it. Underwear also exists to disguise the messy reality of the functions of the body. On the one hand observers are fascinated by layers of clothing being stripped away but are repulsed when confronted with the traces of the body left behind.
As the popular saying goes, "We should never wash our dirty linen in public. Polhemus sees underwear as preventing what he dubs "erotic seepage" p. Thus the tightly laced corset worn by women and children up to the late eighteenth century, when the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau advocated their abolition for children was not just a whim of fashion, it was also believed to lend support to the fragile bodies of women and to constrain their sexuality; women could be "strait-laced" but also "loose.
The corset is also an example of how certain forms of underwear have moved in and out of fashion and have been reworked into different garments that retain the primary function of shaping the body into the fashionable ideal.
The couturier Paul Poiret may have declared the corset dead by the s, but it merely went on to assume other forms such as the dancing corset, girdle, and the roll-on of the s. She subverted the whole notion of the corset as a physically restricting item of underwear by using lycra rather than the original whalebone or steel stays of the nineteenth-century version.
The elasticized sides of Westwood's design meant an end to laces at the front or back. The corset could now be pulled over the head in one easy movement. Silk was far beyond the budget of most people, and knitted woollen stockings were much more common.
Instead, women wore ankle-length linen slips, while men tucked their shirt under their genitals. It was also recently discovered that the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who was mummified after his death in , was wearing boxer shorts at his funeral. In any case, we can summarise that drawers were often worn by men from the s onwards. Bentham had lived through the fashion-crazed 18th century, when a new element of high status underwear entered the fray.
Corsetry was commonly seen on the preening male Macaroni, but it was only their credibility and bank balance that suffered. Historians have traditionally decried corsetry by citing complaints made about the fashion by Victorian writers and doctors, who feared that the crushing of the ribs with whalebone stays inevitably could cause irreparable damage to the body, not least because adapted models were even worn during pregnancy. We want to be comfortable and move freely, whether that's in a loose loincloth, cozy loungewear or other bamboo clothing.
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