Patchword.com : Non-fiction

Zoom text

UNDERWEAR OR LINGERIE; WHICH IS YOURS?

Vivienne Barker

The latest thing ‘outre-manche’ is to have perfume secreted in an embroidered capsule between the cups of your bra, which disperses upon ‘being rubbed’. At the same time, British underwear manufacturers are experimenting with bras and pants made from recycled plastic bottles. So says the latest news from the ‘food and drink show‘ of the underwear world, the Salon de Lingerie, in Paris this month. Could anything bring home more rudely the differences in attitudes to underwear on either side of the channel?

The other day I was emptying the washing-machine of my friend. I might not have clocked the sensible, once-white (I assume) knickers with elastic beyond its stretch-by date, had I not just been perusing this latest news from the Salon de lingerie.

Even if the scent in the new French knickers is likely to disappear after six washes, you can bet these goodies will sell like hot pants – in France.

In brief, or briefs, the French, with their shops tantalisingly stuffed with titillating little numbers in whatever small town you idly wander, still shock us English women, who cling to our memories of solid school knickers, and who worry lest a passing 49 bus should run us down and rush us to hospital in underwear that is not altogether decent.

Now, my friend of the laundry is a successful woman from a family of lawyers. She likes to look good, has manicures, weekly hairdos and goes to the gym three times a week. So why does her underwear go underground, so to speak?

I was curious. I took a straw poll of my friends - or those who deigned to descend to this level of conversation. It seems the main considerations are comfort and something on the lines of ‘who sees them anyway?’ or even - very revealing, this – ‘I have to lose a stone before I could think of indulging myself in such fripperies.’

In the U.K., only the grand occasions: wedding night; honeymoon (I still have the basque I wore); St. Valentine’s night (if he gets lucky), can tempt the puritan from her workaday, sensible, Marks and Spencer’s white (for how long?) knickers covering pelvis to navel. Most women I know say they have not even progressed to the under-wired cup!

Even if they have, my cup floweth over takes on a whole new meaning when the same size bra has been picked up in a department store for the last twenty years without so much as a glance in the direction of the fitting- room. Is this a negative collective memory of those discretely placed plaques outside semis and terraced houses, advertising your personal Spirella agent? For my mother and her generation, she was the doughty matron in the locality who would, by appointment only, measure and order the regulation corset with a thousand hooks, dangling suspenders and rigid whalebones sewn into vertical seams. All this, under the brown-paper wrapping of an ordinary house (seen from the outside). The resulting garment, seldom-washed, was available, in any colour you wanted, as long as it was hospital-bed pink. To us Brits, it seems, fittings have more to do with surgical appliances than tools of seduction.

My daughter has lived in France for six years. She earns the minimum wage as a dental receptionist and her entire wardrobe is contained in a plastic, camping-style, zip-up cupboard, yet she never spends less than £30 on a bra, always buys two pairs of matching pants in different styles and owns twelve sets of underwear at any moment. None of my well-heeled English friends pay more than £14 for a bra, have matching pants, or buy anything other than white, with just one black bra (for evening dresses).

These ingrained attitudes came to the surface only last month in an article advising boyfriends and husbands how to offer lingerie as a St. Valentine’s Day present. They were primly reminded that “it is wiser to go for black or white” and to be aware of “underwear segregation… (which) rigorously separates everyday underwear from precious occasion wear”.

Meanwhile, my daughter tells me her lingerie doesn’t have to be seen to make her feel good. It is part of her jardin secret which assures her she is “worth it”. What is more, French women know the secret pleasures of wearing the same colours underneath as on the outside. If you are wearing burgundy, why aren’t your underpinnings similarly tinted? Most lingerie companies now make plenty of alternatives to the g-string; your abdominal pounds do not have to hang over the top like a wet Monday. High-leg pants with flat sections over the tummy, are wonderfully comfortable to wear, and sexy to boot.

Honestly, I have just rummaged through my Winter drawers (thank God nobody else did), and ruthlessly thrown out anything with a whiff of school; my mother; “will do for hanging about the house”; ditto for “those days of the month” (there are proper products for this, and yes, you do deserve them); indeterminate colouring; too big or too small; owned for more than three years.

Perhaps it’s all in a name – a rose by any other etc. But take note, whilst the French revel in exotic bits of lace signed Ravage, Scandale, what are we lumbered with? Triumph, and Berlei (just say it aloud and you’ll get the drift!) Even Sally Poppy is more redolent of white broderie anglaise purity and is hardly ‘come hither’. I am reliably informed that there is a bra sold by Triumph which outsells all bras in the U.K. without any advertising, does the engineering job demanded by women built like Ava Gardner, and contents itself with the name of Doreen. I know – one of my dearest friends never wears anything else.

But it could be worse. The Germans’ favourite bras rejoice in the names of Amazon and Attila!