An Overview of Ladies' Underwear

from bustles to step-ins to no-bra to nothing--a loving look at unmentionables through the years

If she had to speak of them at all, she called them her unmentionables. Of all the evasive, nice-Nelly terms that proper ladies and gentlemen once used to clothe their naked thoughts, none were more historically accurate than the coyly suggestive euphemisms for women's underwear. Throughout much of human history, female undergarments could not in truth be named--for the very good reason that they simply didn't exist.

When they did come to exist, moreover, modesty had very little to do with it. Mother Eve and her sensational little micromini fig leaf aside, modesty has, in fact, played virtually no part in the origin of any sort of human clothing--under or outer, male or female.

Modesty is born of a sense of shame. And shame concerning human nudity is a relatively late and sophisticated notion; it depends upon the communal taboos of a given time and place. "Where men and women wear only a string around the waist, their dress is decent," one pioneering student of primitive culture has observed, "but it is indecent to leave off the string."

It is from just such a primitive string, or leather thong, that our entire Western wardrobe is supposed to have evolved. So remote was the idea of concealment that the string's first apronlike appendages hung not in front but behind--to protect the seated buttocks from the damp and chilly ground.

By the time the fertility-worshiping Minoans established their civilization on the island of Crete, the original string had been expanded into a colorful, tightly laced bodice that left the breasts--the symbol of fertility--fully exposed. This pop-top Cretan creation is the ancient prototype of all the various kinds of waist cinchers members of the fair sex have worn to accentuate their natural curves.

Also more ornamental than moral was the Greek chiton, a one-piece garment that is generally considered to be the ancient forerunner of all later slips and undershirts. Its earliest styles were slung from one shoulder and left one breast exposed. Featuring a side slit that earned even the austere Spartan women a reputation as displayers of thighs, the kicky chiton was girdled with a shifty waistband called the zona--a name that gave us the English zone, now used in conjunction with such appropriate descriptives as torrid, temperate, frigid, erogenous, speed and no-parking.

According to Pearl Binder, a British student of Muffs and Morals, "Greek women wore no corsets during the finest epochs of Greek history, but during the time of Greek decadence they fastened themselves into corsets." A small waist "never having appealed to the Greeks at any period," the corsets were worn to emphasize the comfy amplitude of Athenian hips; many broad-beamed Greek beauties even wore their zone-huggers to bed.

Roman bosoms were generally supported by a linen underband, called a strophium or mamillare. But Messalina, the sexually insatiable wife of the Emperor Claudius, "wore a linen corset of her own design which pinched in the waist and thrust the breast outward." Messalina's come-hither corset was copied by fashionable matrons and by Roman prostitutes, who considered the empress one of the girls. It was in one of Rome's busiest brothels, Juvenal reports, that "this imperial whore" regularly "showed her golden tits ... took the customers on, with gestures more than inviting." In her heyday--which was every day her husband took a nap--Messalina was reputed to have shucked her clever little corset and indulged in a 24-hour endurance contest, in which she outperformed "a Harlot, that was esteemed the very bravest in Love, by 25 Feats." But according to one Nicolas Venette, who wrote a circa-1740 report on the relative capabilities of famous floozies, Messalina was sexually sluggish compared with Cleopatra, who wore no corsets at all and "underwent in one Night's Time the amorous Efforts of 106 men."

Whatever the glories of ancient Egypt, female underwear wasn't one of them, and Cleopatra was the living embodiment of the human tendency to let it all hang out. She may have worn a see-through mamillare on occasion, but the Theda Bara breastplate usually associated with Egypt's busiest and best-known queen seems to have been more of a moviemaker's concession to 20th Century breast taboos than a bona fide fashion trademark of the Siren of the Nile.

As women's wear, robes of concealment began to appear in the Middle East during that period in history when fertility worship was on the wane and were used to promote bodily shame, rather than to ward off the elements. Concealing feminine curves from the covetous glances of male strangers was a form of birth control and robes were religiously worn in even the warmest weather.

The fact that climate was secondary is further evidenced by the Roman historian Tacitus, who tells us that women of the Germanic north wrapped themselves in sleeveless shifts, (text continued on page 89) in which "the nearest part of the bosom is also exposed." Despite the frigid climate, underclothes were unknown. For outdoor wear in winter, both women and men wrapped themselves in cloaks of fur or wool, "leaving the rest of their persons bare."

Contrary to present-day misconceptions, it was not Roman nudity but wigs, cosmetics and other artificial beauty aids that stirred the righteous wrath of early Christian critics. In their view, undergarments of any sort were sinfully vain and unnatural. The temptations of nude and scantily clad flesh were, in fact, welcomed as a means of strengthening one's powers of sexual denial. Members of some groups "slept with the prettiest persons, that their continence might triumph."

Though such frisky forms of devotion were later banned, many parishioners managed to find and submit to sundry temptations; this led to a certain vogue for hair "shirts of penance," which were worn next (text continued on page 92) An to the sinner's skin throughout the Middle Ages. By the Tenth Century, some religious persons regularly wore rough woolen undergarments to mortify their flesh, although some upper-class women risked eternal damnation by donning undershirts of homespun linen. The Saxons called this shirt a smock--though mention was rarely made of it until after the Norman invasion in 1066 a.d., when the English adopted the French name: chemise. From cors, the Old French word for body, came the English corset--which, at first, seemed to refer to a tightly laced bodice that boosted the bosoms half out of the neckline, to provide a display of cleavage that helped men of all ranks and degrees survive the Dark Ages.

Toward the middle of the 14th Century, the tightly laced dames of the English moat-and-drawbridge set created a new sensation by padding out their hips with a curious kind of improvised bustle. In the candid but gloomy account of a sharp-eyed monk of Glastonbury, they "weredde such strete [tight] clothes that they had long foxtails sewede within ther garments to hold them forthe for to hede [hide] ther arses, the whiche disguising and pride afterwards broughte forthe and causedde many mischiefs and mishappes that hapned in the [realm] of Englond."

Whatever the mischiefs and mishaps these foxtail fanny-falsies may have caused in a kingdom where huntsmen avidly rode to hounds, they were probably no more lethal than the new French scantiness--which, by the winter of 1370, had progressed to the point where the Knight de la Tour Landry raised his visor and observed that many fair young damsels were "dying of cold in their bellies and breasts." The suffering of these blue bloods was due in good part to imported fabrics from the East--some so sheer as to permit Geoffrey Chaucer to give his readers a transparent eyeful of the Lady Largesse:

For through her smocke, wrought with sylke,

The flesshe was sene as whyte as mylke.

In the 15th Century, the smock, or chemise, continued to be regarded as something of a luxury item--though uncomfortable undershirts were still worn by rich and poor as garments of penance and grief. It was said, for example, that Queen Isabella of Spain wore the same undershirt day and night for three years, out of sorrow over the Spanish failure to wrest Granada from the Moors. Granada fell and the queen's shirt came off in 1492--a circumstance that may or may not have influenced the Spanish decision to send Columbus out to find a speedier route to India's aromatic spices.

Corsets, as a separate item of female dress, supposedly evolved from warriors' armor. Introduced into France by Catherine de Médicis, the originals were of hinged steel and had to be fastened with bolts. Suited more to heavy combat than to jousting in the lists of love, these torturous contrivances were the height of 16th Century fashion--especially among the renowned courtesans of Venice, who were the only women in Italy permitted to wear underpants. Their knee-length, heavily embroidered "pantaloons of temptation," officially condoned as a means of stimulating trade, were worn under voluminous skirts, which the flirtatious fancy ladies could coyly hoist up to their hips by means of invisible strings--driving men mad with desire.

In Elizabethan England, breast-flattening corsets gave the upper bodies of fashionable women an appearance almost identical with those of well-dressed men. Portraits of the period suggest that the seduction of a fully clothed Elizabethan charmer must have involved skills similar to those required for dismantling a circus tent. In addition to the velvet-covered metal corset that stiffened the female torso into the rigidity of a center pole, the various layers of petticoats and skirts stood stiffly out from the waist with the aid of a farthingale--a wrap-around bustle of whalebone hoops in the shape of a giant salami, which women wore under their "petty coates." A Spanish innovation, introduced by way of France, the English farthingale was known in lower-class parlance as a bum-roll, by virtue of its intimate contact with milady's bum--or that portion of the anatomy that monks, monarch and milady herself formerly called her arse.

Doors had to be widened and special farthingale chairs were made to accommodate these body bloaters, which eventually grew to a width of four feet. Cautious females stayed indoors on blustery days, for fear that the wind would blow them away like sailboats without rudders. But English Puritans perceived different dangers: Due to the "fardingale," they declared, the commodious skirts of wayward wives and daughters had replaced closets and chests as a favorite hiding place for lovers. At a time when even the most brazen hussies wore underpants only when dancing, the intimacy of this stratagem tickled the popular fancy.

In France, where cleavage was given broad exposure by the low-swooping necklines of Louis XIII's Austrian wife, Anne, the Via Lactea, or Milky Way, was known as the Well of Sanctification--a name that grew increasingly inappropriate as the deeply intriguing cleft became a cross between a miniature carryall and a handy in-and-out box. Notes, keys, watches, handkerchiefs and nosegays all were likely to be dropped down the well, inviting playful search and seizure by nimble-fingered gallants. During the decade of Puritan rule, English cleavage was often obscured by kerchiefs, which women tucked in at the neckline. With the Restoration of Charles II, all such "bibs and tuckers" were out. Busked-up bosoms bobbled and niplets winked in and out of frilly necklines, just as they did at the court of France's Louis XIV. But the full extent of exposure can scarcely be measured today, due to the fact that many 18th Century families had the bosomy portraits of their Restoration ancestors painted over with mantles and tuckers, to create a more seemly appearance.

Among the English, French and Dutch colonists in America, female fashions were as close to those of the homeland as practicality would allow. Colonial cleavage was firmly supported by stays, or busks, of whalebone and wood, some of which may be seen in the collection of heirloom corsetry now preserved at Williamsburg, Virginia.

But just a few hundred miles from Williamsburg, on the Virginia frontier, women of Scotch-Irish stock lived and died without ever having seen a busk. "The linsey petticoat and bedgown" were "the universal dress of our women in early times," an old frontiersman wrote, in describing backwoods life before the Revolution. When not in use, petticoats and bedgowns "were hung in full display on wooden pegs, round the walls of their cabins," serving "in some degree the place of paper hangings... ."

Familiar as hangings in many present-day American homes are gilt-framed reproductions of The Swing, a pastoral scene that Jean Honoré Fragonard, court artist to Louis XV, painted in 1766. Viewed as highly romantic by homemakers who have never studied its details, the painting depicts an aristocratic miss seated on a wide swing, amid poufs of pink-satin skirt, while her lover reclines on the ground before her, gazing up with adoring eyes. But are his eyes really adoring? And what is he staring at? As the beauteous swinger had planned, he is staring right up her skirt--past the tops of her rolled silk hose and between her parted thighs--for a French "display of the graces."

More than the incident itself, The Swing is illustrative of an 18th Century shift of interest from the busked-up breast to the long-hidden female leg. This lowering of erotic sights began about 1710, with the introduction of the hoop skirt--actually, a hooped petticoat, worn beneath the skirt and stiffened (continued on page 213) Ladies Underwear (continued from page 92) into the shape of an oversized lamp shade by means of flexible whalebone hoops. Generally considered by moderns to be the very symbol of 18th Century decorum, the hoop skirt was really a seductive contrivance, which women could tilt up on one side--as high as they wished--to reveal seemingly accidental views of their legs, stockings and garters.

The hoops were awkward, mainly because of their size. One London correspondent, who had evidently met with women wearing hoops of steel, complained to The Guardian that the "great petticoats" were knocking over the wares of street vendors and "hurting men's shins." The writer, who signed himself Tom Pain, was not so severely injured that he failed to observe, "I saw a young lady fall down the other day and believe me, sir, she very much resembled an overturned bell without a clapper."

Such ring-a-ding sights were, perhaps, even more common in pre-Revolutionary America, where poor roads and a scarcity of coaches would often conspire to cause hoop-skirted belles to ride sidesaddle on a horse. Colonial preachers of all persuasions denounced the skittish hoops, which would surely roll their wanton wearers straight into hell. But women of fashion continued to tilt their skirts by sidling close to furniture legs, in the presence of male admirers.

The novelty of legs and garters in no way diminished male enthusiasm for "neate Niplets." The period's penchant for flaunting and fondling breasts is amply illustrated by popular wood engravings, and the old game of hide-and-grope had progressed to the point where Casanova was playing it with raw French oysters:

"I want my oyster," said I.

"Take it, then."

There was no need to tell me twice. I unlaced her corset in such a way as to make it fall still lower, bewailing the necessity of having to search for it with my hands.

What martyrdom for an amorous man to have to conceal his bliss at such a moment!

I did not let Armelline have any occasion to accuse me of taking too much license, for I only touched her alabaster spheres so much as was absolutely necessary.

When I had got the oyster again I could restrain myself no more, and affixing my lips to one of the blossoms of her breasts, I sucked it with a voluptuous pleasure which was beyond all description.

The American Revolution--though inspired in good part by the passionate pamphleteering of a former corset maker named Thomas Paine--had little apparent effect on female underthings, and women of both Britain and the United States emerged from the conflict with high hoops for the future. In France, however, where costly hoop skirts and richly embroidered corsets were symbols of the luxurious self-indulgence of the hated aristocracy, female underclothing fell with the Bastille. Naturalness and nudity were politically correct. "No shoes, stockings, corsets or garters," a bureau chief of the new Ministry of the Interior proclaimed. "No petticoats, but a simple tunic open at both sides."

Convenient as this mode of attire may have seemed to a busy bureaucrat, the idea was too radical for the new woman of France. She hadn't fought at the barricades for the dubious liberté to go knocking around Paris in a shapeless piece of unstitched yard goods, like a barefooted frump. To avoid a second revolution, therefore, the government appointed the artist David to design a dress that would reflect the French affinity for the ideals of ancient Greece. Patterned after the gauzy chiton worn by Hellenic nymphs, the new French style was a sheerly transparent "chemise, held together by a band under the bosom," and "exposed not merely shoulders but the breast as well."

"These days you see the bosom of a woman more easily and sooner than the face," a wide-eyed journalist noted in 1795.

Some women "preferred to wear white or flesh-colored tights underneath this simple costume, but not a few left their limbs unadorned except for anklets or toe rings." With or without such seldom-noticed accessories, the style quickly spread. From Philadelphia, then capital of the United States, Abigail Adams, the President's wife, regaled her sister in Braintree, Massachusetts, with a newsy description of a leading American devotee of the new French flimsiness: "When this Lady has been led up to make her curtzey, which she does most gracefully, it is true, every Eye in the Room has been fixed upon her her [hair?], and you might literally see through her."

The rapid adoption of the Directoire mode among American females of first rank is indicated by the fact that only a few weeks later, Betsy Mason, the "fassinating" young daughter of the Senator from Massachusetts, attended a party at the Presidential mansion wearing a frock so transparent that the first lady "could not but lament that the uncovered bosom should display what ought to have been veild." In neither case, moreover, does "Her Majesty" Abigail make mention of pantaloons or drawers--the wearing of which by females was considered even more shocking to Americans than total nudity.

A major share of the credit for toppling the English taboo against women wearing drawers is given to Princess Charlotte, daughter of George III, who set a royal example by displaying her knee-length drawers at court.

In France, where the see-through, pseudo-Greek style resulted in "innumerable colds, influenzas and pulmonary complaints," short corsets came in--not to ward off the sneezes and wheezes but to elevate the bosom to its former state of pre-Revolutionary prominence. These French boosters pushed the bosoms "up to the chin" and aristocratic cleavage was made available to all by the 1803 invention of a "divorce corset," with a patented padded-steel plate that held the upthrust breasts apart.

Meanwhile, Americans of both sexes were still trying to get used to the idea of "decent" women wearing underdrawers. By 1820, a compromise solution was offered in the form of individual "pantalet" legs that could be tied above the knee. More "moral" than drawers, in that they lacked a seat, the new ruffled pantalets were nevertheless a source of constant distress. "I will never put them on again," one dissatisfied customer confided, after experimenting with eight different pairs. "I dragged my dress in the dirt for fear someone would spy them. My finest dimity pair with real Swiss lace is quite useless to me, for I lost one leg and did not deem it proper to pick it up, and so walked off leaving it in the street behind me... . I saw that mean Mrs. Spring wearing it last week as a tucker... . I hope there will be a short wearing of these horrid pantalets, they are too trying." Happily, the troublesome shams went out of style within a decade--though they were still worn by little girls and, as one English visitor noted, as modest coverings for the limbs of naked pianofortes.

In the first 50 years of independence, Americans increasingly rejected the "dissolute" modes and manners of European cultures; patriotism came to serve the cause of prudery. The old Yankee flair for displaying legs and bosoms was lost. In describing The Domestic Manners of the Americans in the Jacksonian era, England's Mrs. Trollope told of the indignation provoked in Cincinnati by leg art. In a "garden where people go to eat ices," there was a sign "representing a Swiss peasant girl" with a "petticoat so short as to shew her ancles. The ladies saw, and shuddered; and it was formally intimated to the proprietor that if he wished for the patronage of the ladies of Cincinnati, he must have the petticoats of this figure lengthened."

Much to her British bewilderment, Mrs. Trollope was informed that she had inadvertently "offended one of the principal families in the neighborhood, by having pronounced the word corset before the ladies of it."

The modesty gap that existed between Americans and their British cousins is further evidenced by the Reminiscences of an Idler, named Henry Wikoff. A well-to-do Philadelphian, just out of college, young Wikoff embarked on a tour abroad that landed him in London in 1834. At times the young Philadelphian's book reads like a Baedeker of British bosoms, as he goes about marveling at the sights--the "lovely bust" of Lady Blessington and the regal cleavage displayed by young Princess Victoria, at her 18th-birthday ball: "In person she was something under medium height, and most symmetrically formed. Her bust was strikingly handsome."

In a few short years, however, the symmetry of Victoria the Queen was to be rendered squat and awesome by jupons de crinoline--a multiplicity of petticoats lined with horsehair, "to make the dress sit beautifully." Industrial growth had bred a moneyed middle class, whose work-oriented morality was reflected in the unbending rigidity of long corsets, and whose affluent pride was swelled and stiffened by the hair of horsetails, used to upholster sofas and women. Skirts expanded along with the Empire and petticoats were puffed out by means of pneumatic tubes, "with a nozzle for the insertion of a bellows." Women wore 14 petticoats "in evening dress," the Ladies' Companion revealed. "They go to a ball standing up in their carriages."

In both Europe and America, women tottered under the bulk and weight of six or seven petticoats in daytime, and feminist dress reformers sought a "rational" alternative. Taking a lead from Elizabeth Smith Miller, of Peterboro, New York, Amelia Jenks Bloomer, of Seneca Falls, created national controversy by wearing a pants suit with Turkish-type pantaloons, which soon became known as Bloomers. But visible "bifurcated garments" were too far out to find acceptance at a time when American women were just beginning to cotton to flannel underdrawers. Relief from the weight and heat of horsehair petticoats came in December 1856, with the French invention of a "metal crinoline"--a cagelike petticoat frame, made up of a series of horizontal steel hoops, that hung from the waist on vertical tapes.

Introduced to the American readers of Peterson's Magazine in 1858, under the heading "Useful Novelties for the Month," the "cage-crinoline" fulfilled the female "desire for wide skirts without impeding the legs by hot and heavy petticoats." But it also incurred the instant dislike of males as a most formidable obstacle to courtship and conjugal relations. Recognizing this drawback, one British firm brought out a superflexible model that would "bear a good squeeze without getting out of order." But the erotics of the steel crinoline were mainly visual and centered on leg and ankle display, as did the earlier hoop skirt.

In the 1860s, reformers railed against the crinoline as a hazard to both morals and physical safety. In America, Maria M. Jones pitied the female fashion slave who "frantically grasping her skirts ... tiptoes across the street, with her clothing in the rear at an altitude of which she has no conception, and revealing not only feet and ankles but even limbs, to an extent which a neatly clad Bloomer would blush to think of." Others bemoaned the overcrowding of public conveyances and the menace to fragile parlor whatnots. More serious yet were accidents caused by crinolines catching in carriage wheels and fatalities to wearers who were blown off cliffs. But most deadly of all was the danger of fire, which the wide, inflammable petticoats presented in an era of oil lamps, candles and open hearths. "Take what precautions we may against fire, so long as the hoop is worn, life is never safe," London's Illustrated News of the World warned in 1863, after 2000 crinoline-clad women were burned to death in Chile. "All are living under a sentence of death which may occur unexpectedly in the most appalling form."

Ultimately, it was not prudence but the fickleness of female fashion that led to the downfall of the crinoline. After seven years, it became "rather daring not to wear a crinoline at all indoors." A narrower silhouette, with fewer petticoats, became the vogue, and Paris stylists groped about for a new fashion focus. The trend was to curves, bolstered, if need be, by false bosoms "of pink rubber, which follow the movements of respiration with mathematical and perfect precision." An equally crafty demi-temps, or "half-time," belly bolster, put the tummy in active competition with the bust. But in the end, all eyes were drawn to milady's backside, with a big assist from an undercover put-on that was known, variously, as a dress improver, a tournure, a bertha and a bustle.

Shaped like a bumblebee's bum and somewhat resembling the jump seat on a modern motorcycle, the early models were made of a variety of cloth materials, built on a frame of wire mesh. "Have you seen the wonderful cushion Wire Bustle?" an American advertiser asked in the stylish pages of Peterson's Magazine. "Here It Is! It Leads Them all! You can sit on it, stand on it or jump on it, and it comes right back into shape."

With, perhaps, the addition of wire-mesh "bosom forms," to counterbalance the gibbosity of the rump, the bustle eventually grew to be the outstanding underthing of the 19th Century. In the Seventies and Eighties, chairs were designed "with a space at the back above the seat to allow for the passage of the bustle." For Queen Victoria's Jubilee, in 1887, patriotism brought up the British rear with a patented bertha containing a music box that played God Save the Queen whenever the wearer sat down--a self-defeating gesture, in that she had "immediately to rise again, and everyone else with her."

"Braided Wire Bustles Have Come to Stay, for Women Understand They Cannot Afford to Let Them Go" was a snappy slogan that appeared in the Ladies' Home Journal in 1889. But a growing number of people were beginning to wonder about the advisability of women wearing corsets. In pursuit of an 18-inch waist that "a man could span with his hands," the Victorian torso was laced into an "hourglass" corset that Thorstein Veblen, the American social scientist, denounced as a mutilation. The findings of anticorset reformers supported the Veblen view, although few members of the medical profession ventured to describe the displacement of internal organs and the deformation of the ribs that the wearing of tight corsets caused. Female disorders were at an all-time high, and those whom prudery or poverty deprived of a doctor's coddling care resorted to the use of patent medicines offering everything from "a Sure Cure for Prolapsus Uteri, or Falling of the Womb" to instant relief from "dragging sensation in the groin, sparks before the eyes, hysteria, temple and ear throb, a dread of some impending evil, morbid feelings and the blues."

Politicians nobly stumbled where the medicos refused to tread. In 1894, a member of the French Chamber of Deputies proposed to combat tight lacing by imposing a stiff tax on corsets. In the Wisconsin legislature, Henry L. Dagget, of Bear Creek, fought to abolish corsets from the Badger State and was ridiculed out of office as "Corset" Dagget. On all levels of government, officials maintained a hands-off policy.

Nowhere was tight corseting more prevalent than in the military fleshpots of central Europe, where Prussian officers corseted their girth into rigid submission, and overstuffed Valkyries panted and groaned within the creaking confines of the "Colossus," the "Hercules" and the "Grenadier." Clinical case histories of the Nineties give exhaustive evidence of psychosexual aberrations involving the period corset. Putting it on and taking it off became an erotic stimulant for everything from ordinary intercourse to transvestite flagellation à trois. Sedate European businessmen kept their mistresses' perfumed corsets hidden in desk drawers, to caress and sniff between appointments. Elderly noblemen collected corset strings stolen or purchased from prostitutes and schoolgirls. (No item of attire, however, had more kinky aficionados than did female underdrawers. Since the Seventies, the French had been doing all sorts of shocking things to them--like making them of tinted silk and lacing ribbons through the fancy knee ruffles! Favored mainly by fast women of the haut and demimonde, the naughty French innominables were spurned by decent American females, who remained loyal to their durable--and by now virtuous--cotton and flannel drawers.) Lasting relief from the tyranny of tight corsets did not arrive until well into the 20th Century, when the need for typists and stenographers brought increasing numbers of young women into the business world and the new "jass" bands drew America's youth onto the dance floor.

The stepped-up tempos of both commerce and dancing made rigid corseting impractical. Manufacturers experimented with lighter materials, and whalebone corset stays were replaced with steel and Celluloid. The whaling industry hit bottom, while the steel industry began to live off the fat of the land. With America's entry into World War One, however, it became a choice between steel stays for the home front and armament to fight the Kaiser. In response to a plea from the War Industries Board, American women sacrificed their corset stays to the tune of 28,000 tons--"enough to build two battleships." Patriotism was rewarded with undreamed-of comfort, and when the German grip on Europe was broken, many women were reluctant to return to the bondage of steel stays.

To meet "the requirements of style, comfort and health," elastic girdles appeared, designed to hold the figure "in position" without the aid of stays. Improvements in the fabrication of mass-produced rayon put silky undies and stockings within the reach of all. Skirts began to inch higher to display sheerly clad legs. Drawers retreated to the upper thigh and earned the spicily diminutive name panties. Skimpier, sexier undershirts brought back into popular use the old French word chemise--which became shimmy, when Gilda Gray, a Polish-born Broadway dancer, described her quivering performance as "shaking my shim-mee."

"You Just Know She Wears Them" was a national catch phrase of the giggling Twenties, when McCallum Hosiery used the slogan to promote its line of budget legwear. But it was often difficult to tell, just from looking, whether or not she was wearing one of the new brassières--little chest corsets that had evolved from the upper portion of a French foundation garment designed for fatties in 1902. Made to flatten the bosom, as though a bras, or arm, were pressed across the breasts, the brassiere provided the full-breasted flapper with the boyish figure the Twenties prized. If her bust were naturally small, there was no need for a girl to wear a bra at all. Given the boyish hips of cartoonist John Held, Jr.'s jazz babies, she could even dispense with an elastic girdle or corselet. In which case she simply stepped into one of the new chemise-and-panty combinations, which she called--guess what?--step-ins.

Lacking a foundation to hitch her stockings to, the short-skirted "chicken" wore a garter belt or rolled her rayons above the knee. Glimpses of thigh had even nearsighted males humming Tin-Pan Alley's hit tune Roll 'Em, Girlies, Roll 'Em, and America's latter-day puritans issued thunderous predictions of Armageddon. It was fast-and-loose speculation rather than skimpy fashions that caused the bottom to drop out of the Wall Street market in 1929, but hemlines fell, nevertheless, and women began to look around for ways to augment their physical assets.

As though in preparation for the day when the bust would rise again, Mrs. Ida Rosenthal, a farsighted Russian-born retailer of ladies' dresses, went into the business of manufacturing brassieres in 1922. Years of fitting and design resulted in a cupped "uplift" bra, which was marketed under the now-familiar name Maiden form. Other dreamers and doers got in the uplift line; in 1935, Warner's brought forth a new concept: brassieres with alphabetical cup sizes, A, B, C and D.

In the late Thirties, the uplift bra was responsible for the rise of a busty new breed of Hollywood star, of whom Lana Turner was most prominent as the much-photographed "sweater girl." For the A-cup girl who aspired to film-star proportions, false bosoms called Gay Deceivers were available.

Depression winters had established a seasonal fad for knitted, knee-length drawers, called woollies, snuggies and teddies. But on the eve of World War Two. the American female's wardrobe of undergarments had pretty much settled into a pattern of brassiere, panties, girdle and slip. From the waist down, the elasticized girdle reigned supreme--despite the fact that it obliterated the natural cleavage of the nates and produced a "uniform posterior bulge" that one post--World War Two critic called the "mono-buttock."

The peacetime cutback in parachute production released vast quantities of nylon for the manufacture of hosiery and brief underpants--the potential fanciness of which was underscored when U. S. tennis star Gussie Moran flaunted "briefs with white lace showing" at the staid Wimbledon tournament in 1949. In so doing, Gorgeous Gussie started a fad for decorative derrières that made the Wimbledon matches a carnival of sightly underpants. Players vied to outdo one another with briefs of shocking pink and 18-kt. gold, as spectators struggled to keep their eyes on the ball. Leopardskin, mink trimming and even a Confederate flag had bedecked the lady competitors' bottoms by the time Wimbledon officials called a halt to die fancy-pants era in 1962.

In the bra business, old hands credit the sky-high ideal of the late Forties and Fifties to the aeronautical-engineering savvy the moviemaking zillionaire Howard Hughes applied to the construction of a bra for Jane Russell to wear in his saga of cowboys and cleavage, The Outlaw. Calculated to make the most of every last micromillimeter of mammary allure, the Outlaw bra extended the uplift principle to the point where the breasts resembled the nose cones on ballistic missiles. Other prominent Hollywood figures helped popularize the pointy style, and women all over the Western world dreamed of acquiring the new American look. "A good bra is a beauty must," the British readers of Good Taste were told. "All American women know--beauty begins with the bra." Breasting the high-rise tide in 1964, California's Rudi Gernreich created a world-wide sensation with a topless bathing suit and a transparent blouse--modeled without a bra.

The Gernreich showing threatened the very foundations of the billion-dollar undergarment industry. Manufacturers moaned and foundered; all was chaos and flux. Until, that is, Exquisite Form "took the bull by the horns" and recruited Gernreich--the creator of the 20th Century topless mode--to design a chimerical No-Bra bra!

To satisfy the habitual undie hunger of American women, Exquisite Form went on the market with a series of see-through follow-ups: the No Side bra ("Rudi's newest. Essential for the new porthole fashions... ."), the No Back ("It's all front. No back... ."), the All-in-None ("Rudi's one-piece masterpiece with a deep plunging front... . Works under anything... ."). Amid all the transparent Nos, there was even an opaque Maybe--for indecisive teens, who weren't sure they could measure up.

But surely there is no need to brief the present audience of readers on the sort of thing that has been going on--and coming off--since the Sixties. Counterculture street fashions, coupled with women's lib, gave underthings short shrift. The new unfettered feeling found favor even among establishment females, and the undie rip-off spread. What does the future promise? Who can honestly say? Within five years, a single string may be the thing. Or space-age corsets. Or AM/FM bustles--rear-end radios that will play music and give weather reports 24 hours a day. The cyclical nature of fashion is such that the future of ladies' mentionables would seem to lie somewhere in the past. But, as the designers and executives of the Treo Company learned in 1965, it doesn't pay for a girdle manufacturer to push any patriotic associations with the nation's history.

" 'Stars 'n stripes' girdle banned on D. A. R. protest," The New York Times announced in a firmly molded headline that s-t-r-e-t-c-h-e-d across two columns. As described in the story, the girdle had "eight blue stars on a white background, and red and white vertical stripes." Treo had distributed about 3000 to stores before the Daughters of die American Revolution demanded that the Stars 'n Stripes girdle, which they felt was desecrating the American flag, "be withdrawn from sale."

Now, none of us would like to see our nation's flag confused with a panty girdle. But without having seen what they look like--and without ever wanting to--it's fairly safe to say that the D. A. R. ladies' underduds could be run up the flagpole any time. Traffic might grind to a halt, people might stop and gawk. A few might even feel compelled to doff their hats in respect. But I venture to say that nobody--but n-o-b-o-d-y--in his right mind would salute.