Charlie's Dead...

[Kate XXXXXX]

   ...Or how underwear became visible in more than just the modern era: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7689554.stm

[Amras Elfwine]

"The dipping half-slip was like a lowered window-shade."

Ah, Kate lass, yuh never fail to make me smile!!

[Taffy Saltwater]

My mom would say, "It's snowing down south" if a slip showed.

[Anna Iram]

What a great topic! I never really thought of it as showing off my undergarmets, but I do love the way a ruffle from a chemise neckline or cuff peeks out from a garmet. Not in a vanity way, like I'm showing off , but it's almost sensual to me. Hard to explain. Didn't know Anna was being naughty!

In modern times I have found the custom of wearing bejeweled thongs specifically so they might peek out from a low riding jean pretty interesting. I don't show my undies off in public, not my thing, but knowing I have some frippery beneath is kind of a thrill.

Long Live Victoria!!

[isabelladangelo]

So many things wrong with that article....  Never EVER try to "impose" modern ideals onto historical prescient.   It just makes for all sorts of nonsense.   As for the embroidered undergarments:  well, yes, they were embroidered.  However, as the painting of QEI clearly shows, they weren't to show off.  You might see the sleeve and the high neck, but that was it.  To even think of mixing the ideals of modern underwear and historical underwear is really, utterly, wrong.  Two very different world views with two very different ideas of the body.   What the author of that piece was thinking is completely beyond me. 

The women who wore the extraordinarily smock- and undershirt-revealing styles of the late 16th century had to be seen as paragons of virtue by all. No well-born woman could risk being construed as provocative on the basis of what she wore.

Ummm...yeah, she could.   Obviously missed that whole Puritan thing.  Ya know, the one were Philip Stubbes railed against the "kind of attire appropriate onely to man, yet they blushe not to weare it".   

::sigh::

[Anna Iram]

I don't know Isabella. I admit I was being a bit lighthearted in my response, but I think the authors point, while treated as a frippery, was this:


"At a workshop on Tudor underwear I attended last week, run by the Early Modern Dress and Textiles Research Network, it was suggested that once these items of clothing were decorated with silver and gold thread-work - so they became both uncomfortable next to the skin, and difficult to launder - another, simpler smock or shirt had to be worn beneath them, adding further to the layering."



I think we are much like our Elizabethan ancestors in that what was once an undergarmet became so decorrated it became a part of the outergarmet, if only by a "peek". Just as we allow a peek at a lace top camisole . We shop specifically to show it off. Not really an undergarment any longer.