Between the end of the 19th century and the end of the 20th century, various new types of lingerie emerged: camisole-panties, bras, girdles, panties and knickers, petticoats, corsets, corselets, garter belts, baby doll nightgowns, panty-girdles, and tights. All these pieces remain in use today, in different forms and fabrics, with varying degrees of success. At the same time, other older items, such as the crinoline, the bustle, and the corset, have returned to circulation – at least in a high fashion context and in fetishist rituals and practices – and certain other reappropriations have also expanded the repertoire: in the 1980s, for example, boxer shorts appeared as an item in the female wardrobe – in fact, sportswear and underwear now constitute quite flexible categories. Our era is rarely considered in the history of underwear, given that it has not been very inventive: indeed, it can be argued that the only true novelty since the 1980s has been the bodysuit, or simply the body. Probably derived from ballerina leotards, it covers the body from the bust to the thigh, preventing access to other intimate parts. As a piece that can be worn both as underwear and as outerwear, the bodysuit fits into the taxonomy of intimate apparel. Sociologists since the 1960s, particularly Pierre Bourdieu, have familiarized us with the concept of embodiment – a key element in any history of underwear: clothing and, by extension, cosmetics, have become incomparable social signifiers. Any analysis of the mechanics of contemporary underwear must be done from this perspective. Any attention given to the variety available and to the underwear itself is inseparable from the study of the customs, projections, and transgressions associated with them. Between the mid-19th century and our era, we can distinguish three distinct periods in relation to underwear and the body. Until 1910-20, accumulation was the rule. The layering of skirts, bloomers, chemises, and corsets, as well as the optical illusion effect of corsets and bustles, allowed underwear to be described as a kind of subterranean garment, an architectural foundation of the costume worn in society. A strictly ordered dress code clearly determined what was hidden and what was shown: the naked and the dressed. The dressed body was buried under layers of clothing, without regard for its actual morphology. From the beginning of the 20th century until the 1960s and 70s, the shaping of human anatomy itself became important. Underwear – the most direct intermediary between the body and clothing – strictly disciplined the figure. Female forms were shaped according to the dictates of fashion, through the reinforcement provided by underwear.
A third phase, at the end of the 20th century, punctuates this history. The division between underwear and outerwear, between the visible and the invisible, began to seem more unstable. The skin itself became the new frontier of undressing. The lingerie interface no longer served only to receive or contain what overflowed from the body – on the contrary, underwear now acted to modify the surface and even the interior of the body. It was capable of cleansing, tanning, perfuming, hydrating; it cared for the epidermis and firmed, renewed, and compressed the flesh. Underwear makes what it modifies conspicuous and visible to all; the same care is taken to ensure that beauty, health, strength, and flexibility are suggested – or rather, still seen. Underwear no longer hides; its purpose is to fully "reveal" a body's potential and, thus, confirm the ideal of malleability. In response to the modesty and hindrances of 19th and 20th-century underwear, we have the tyranny of the visible in the 21st century. Instead of the values of restraint, those of pleasure and flourishing are promoted – including role-playing, as humor is another form of flexibility. The uncomfortable response to the prohibition of external display is the concealment of the female body under the Islamic hijab. On the other hand, merely visible underwear suggests complicity, but is never free of ambiguity. One only needs to think of clothes stamped with designer labels in the years immediately following the turn of the millennium. At first glance, a 2008 item adorned with the famous designer name John Galliano in capital letters on the waistband of the panties was simply vulgar self-promotion; but, on another level, it was a bold, even "intellectual" response to aggressive marketing, an ironic critique of the irrepressible desire for media celebrity. Men's briefs marketed with a focus on the genitals are another example of intimate pieces that are both fun and serious.
It is tempting to draw a parallel between the three "ages" of underwear described here and the three cultural periods corresponding to the types of Western capitalism analyzed by sociologists Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello. According to Max Weber, cited by the authors, this economic system does not impose itself simply through coercion and the interaction between force and exploitation; it also requires complicity – that is, people's consensual belief in certain values, the personal involvement of "protagonists" in the name of a common good. In this way, social agents undoubtedly "embody" these values in their lifestyles, which makes it possible to draw pertinent parallels; the dominant values feed the imagination, the lifestyles, and the representations of the self presented by the universe of objects that demarcate the "territory of the ego." Underwear would thus become the privileged markers of these territories. Analyzing how these objects took on a gender, in this case, the feminine, is another question.
The first patriarchal form of capitalism was considered based on the principle of the concentration of property and power in the same hands. It required its leaders to have a set of contradictory qualities so that such accumulation could be both prudent and audacious. And "it is precisely this confusion of such diverse, even incompatible, arrangements and values – the greed for profit and moralism, avarice and charity, scientism and family traditionalism – that is at the origin of the division of the bourgeois class within itself… that is, at the essence of what will become the most unanimously and most durably denounced aspect of the bourgeois spirit: its hypocrisy." A "double-speak" dress code was a fundamental part of this bourgeois "hypocrisy." Amidst the "soft" layers of underwear, quite distinct from the garments worn by women in society, surprising innovations emerged that would have caused scandal in public: knickers, camisole-panties, corset-bras. A clear visual separation distinguished underwear from outerwear. The lingerie repertoire, a vast wardrobe of intimate pieces, encompassed all possible "black and white" replicas of the outerwear wardrobe — as if the dressed body were merely covering pale duplicates of itself. Certain déshabillé pieces from the late 19th century resemble tight, elegant urban costumes in two parts. But they are made of white cotton with English embroidery trim. The petticoats, adorned with Valencienne lace applications, are cut in the same way as the fabric of the skirt itself. But the materials for the petticoats are cotton, batiste, or muslin, for the finest ones. The closer to the surface, the more the ornamentation changes, and the petticoat closest to the skirt is made of colored satin. The second age of capitalism distinguished capital from power, which was delegated to leaders, directors, and bureaucrats. This economic and cultural system, solidly established since the 1930s, was based on strong disciplinary, hierarchical, and bureaucratic restrictions, tolerated in exchange for the promise of security and a promising future for its participants. It was this disciplinary corset that was so vehemently contested in the French protests of May 1968 and, more generally, by the libertarian spirit of the time – at the price of greater "flexibility" and less "mobility." The rhetoric of the "liberation" of bodies became dominant. One of the notable effects of this ideology was that transgression became more difficult in the contemporary culture of lingerie. In the first age of lingerie, overlays, furtive glances, and surprises were highly eroticized disturbances, grounded in the stratified system of clothing. In the second age, the repression of desire could manifest itself in a stylistic detachment, indicated by the monotony of the new flesh-pink lingerie, through a series of clichés. Fetishistic displays of historical intimate pieces, such as the corset, are an example of this – stereotyped, for instance, by the erotic photographs of Yva Richard published in Paris in the 1930s. Certain brands elegantly explored this form of historicism cultivated through a deviant fetishism. The "Oh" brand stockings, marketed by designer Jacques Fath in the mid-1950s, were typical. Their lacy ornamentation around the thigh was invisible when the wearer was dressed. This hidden border exalted the fantasy associated with this type of piece. The name "Oh" suggests the playful pleasure of discovery. By the late 1960s, the provocative pose (sometimes rhetorical, sometimes demonstrative) was to forgo underwear and reject the various harnesses used by the previous generation. And yet, twenty years later, these pieces had become acceptable again: they no longer represented social or sexist restrictions, but fantasies in action. In the pages of so-called women's magazines, the free and mutable expression of personality, the search for one's own peculiar desires, were exhaustively celebrated. In diverse social contexts — the work environment, for example — individuals were expected to "get into the game." And an unsustainable contradiction arose from the ambivalent demands of play and authenticity. Unexpectedly, the resolution of this contradiction and the critique of this ambivalent norm began to appear in the rediscovered game of appearances — fashion, in other words. A suitable mask to recreate imaginary underwear.
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