A lingerie revolution

Penelope Green is a freelance writer living in Manhattan. Thongs, corsets, push-up bras–this is not a peep show for men; it’s a way women remind themselves of their playful, more erotic side Penelope Green laces into some pretty racy stuff.

On a bright Friday afternoon early last March, in the Victoria’s Secret store in Manhattan’s Herald Square, there was a crowd of women of all shapes and sizes, all colors and ages, fomenting what you would have to call an underwear revolution, and voting with their dollars, as marketing people like to say, for the right to be adorned with a beaded pearl thong. The store’s first floor offered a cornucopia of basques and balconettes (see “A Lingerie Pictionary,” on page 154) embellished with satin ribbons and pearls, sequins and feathers. In the panty boutique–a section wholly devoted to the derriere–were retro girdle-and-garter sets in beauty-parlor pink and black satin; garter skirts with chiffon flounces; frothy panties covered in petals of multicolored chiffon; satin panties you could customize with rhinestone lettering; and a whole army of thongs with ribbon ties.

“I’m after garter-y things,” said Karen LaPorte, 31, a fashion designer with an armful of black satin, the garter tapes swinging merrily as she shopped. “It’s time to update; besides, the plain stuff only goes so far.”

Indeed, the plain stuff was hidden upstairs, past the push-up bras and balconettes in the new Angels collection, past the lace demis and the matching boy shorts. Most of the store brimmed with the naught, the saucy, and the near pornographic. A cheerful domination scene was being played out by two mannequins wearing merry widows, thongs, and spiked heels. The dominator, which is to say the mannequin who stood astride her prone sister, wore a leather cap and sported a sequin riding crop with a feather flourish. All around them I saw shoppers–women like you and me–stroking and patting the feathers, running expert eyes over the basques, gathering handfuls of thongs and garter sets. They were shopping, and buying: Victoria’s Secret sales went from $3.3 billion in 2001 to $3.6 billion last year, a shocking rise when most apparel sales were plummeting. According to the NPD Group, a market information company, women’s apparel sales dropped 6 percent last year, while intimate apparel dropped a mere 2.5 percent. Historically, there is a corollary between hard times and strong sales of what fashion historian Valerie Steele calls semiprivate pleasures, meaning cosmetics and lingerie. This so-called lipstick phenomenon applies to both wartime exigencies and recessions/depressions. Sales of foundation garments during the early 1930s held fast, for instance; during the 1990-91 recession, lipstick sales climbed.

Victoria’s Secret may be the gorilla in the silk teddy, as one New York Times reporter wrote last year, but it’s not the only animal in the zoo. Last winter wild underthings were selling briskly at Frederick’s of Hollywood, which emerged from bankruptcy in January with $150 million worth of sales and a sassier, less cheesy look. Agent Provocateur, a racy London import with stores in New York City and Los Angeles, has plans to open six more underwear boutiques in the States next year. La Petite Coquette is a 25-year-old Manhattan institution whose fortunes have surged in the past year, requiring an expansion from its original jewel-box store into a two-story undies spa.

Alexandra Limpert, a 36-year-old tomboyish metal sculptor, was in La Petite Coquette that same Friday afternoon buying no fewer than 15 pieces of lingerie, including two lace-up black corsets–one embellished with tiny red flowers–as well as a midnight blue peekaboo slip edged in black lace, and a fistful of nearly invisible thongs with matching bras in reds, purples, and blues. “Because I do welding, I’m always covered in dust,” explained Limpert, who wore a demure black peacoat and a sober expression, and who quickly revealed herself to be a lingerie evangelist. “So I want to wear something feminine underneath. It’s mostly just for me. Lingerie elevates your body to something beautiful, not mundane.”

If you spend time watching women buying beautiful underwear, or if you buy it yourself, you quickly learn what a happy endeavor the whole thing is. You learn that lingerie is democratic, inclusive. Fashion, on the other hand, is by nature exclusive. A designer’s vision rarely embraces a wide swath of the population; the cost of designer clothing similarly restricts its appeal and accessibility Yet a filmy, frothy push-up bra or a side-tie thong is more than just forgiving of a thousand shapes. It augments and highlights whatever you have. These confections allow you to play with fashion–and lingerie is private fashion–without going into escrow, says Linda LoRe, who came to be the CEO of Frederick’s of Hollywood from the ranks of the respectable Giorgio Beverly Hills and Bloomingdale’s.

“A lot of women want to feel good in a sexual way, too,” LoRe says, “and that’s not necessarily about the act of sex. It’s about delighting in your own curves, in your own body Who would have thought that at my age, at 49, I’d be wearing a thong every day? No matter what’s going on in the world, you can have this private party for yourself. You can go to work and know that underneath it all, you’re hot.”

Rebecca Apsan, proprietor of La Petite Coquette, tells a (possibly apocryphal) story about Florenz Ziegfeld, of Ziegfeld Follies fame. “‘Why,’ he inquired peevishly of his wife, ‘are we spending so much on lingerie for the girls?’ Her reply was short and sweet: ‘Because it makes them walk better.’” Apsan accompanied the story with a marvelous stride and wiggle, and a quick flash of her undergarments. That day she was wearing a lavender bra and thong under her lavender sweater set and faded jeans. After an hour with her, of running my hands through the baskets of striped Brazilian-cut underpants, of scrolling through the poster boards on which Apsan has fashioned an underwear gallery with every manner of thong pinned upon them, I learned that bottom cleavage is very big right now. That embellishments of every kind–feathers, beads, ribbons–are being hung from the back of panties. That the British make the kinkiest underwear (like the lace-up corset panties with the bow in back from Buttress & Snatch. “Those blew out at Valentine’s Day,” says Apsan). That corsets–which start at $150 even at Victoria’s Secret, and which rode into the culture on Nicole Kidman in Moulin Rouge–are still big. That garters are in high demand, too, possibly because of the success of that terrific underwear and garter movie Chicago. (Best underwear song: “Cell Block Tango.”) And soon I, a newly single woman with no plans to change that fact, found myself wandering home with two Brazilian-cut candy-striped undies and a black push-up bra. JUAN DE ARCO read the tag on the panties, which is Spanish for that famous virgin Joan of Arc.

“The notion that wearing hot underwear means you are making yourself solely an object of the male gaze is a bit simplistic,” says Steele, who serves as the director of the museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan. “Lingerie, like shoes, is certainly part of the erotic vocabulary But I think many women have a much more complicated relationship with their bodies, being simultaneously the subject and object of their own gaze. The word narcissist tends to be used pejoratively But if you take the negative aspect away from it, it’s a good word to describe what’s going on. You can be voyeur and love object all at once. The eye that is gazing and admiring is your own.” Indeed, at home with my new undies, I danced a cha-cha in front of the bathroom mirror.

If lingerie is part of the erotic vocabulary; Agent Provocateur, designed in high bordello style–pink and black with lots of velvet–has the wittiest pun: The store’s famous City Bra ($198), made from pin-striped shirting with a faux collar winking above your cleavage, gives a nod to its typically buttoned-up customer. I spoke with Serena Rees, who, with her husband and business partner, Joseph Corr?, imagined Agent Provocateur as both a high-fashion haunt and a haven for those who were fleeing the beige, black, and white wares at department stores. Corr?’s mom is Vivienne Westwood, grande dame of British punk fashion. A few years ago, Rees had a fan letter from a happy customer, a writer for the London Sunday Times. She described “getting a chewing out from her boss,” Rees recalled, “and she just let it roll over her,” armored by the see-through red undies she was wearing under her pinstriped suit.

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