Underwear

I read a story once. I read it long, long ago, and I don't remember where, which is kind of amazing, because I no sooner read it, than it got stuck in my head, and has been fascinating me ever since:

It took place during the Renaissance, someplace in Europe that was north enough to get really cold in the wintertime. And it told about this court lady, a lady-in-waiting to a queen or something, who was following along in the procession behind her royal mistress as was her duty. And this lady needed to go, really, really badly, but she didn't want to leave the procession, and she certainly didn't want to call everyone else to a halt, just because she'd been caught short. And since ladies didn't wear underpants back then, and since she had a huge wooden farthengale holding her skirts away from her body as was the style at the time, she decided just to pee as she walked. But it was very, very cold that day, and according to the story, the poor lady's pee-stream froze solid as it was leaving her body, and the next thing she knew, she was rooted to the ground by a pillar of her own frozen-solid pee.

I've wondered ever since then: Could it really happen?

This story has very little to do with the history of undergarments, I know, and the main reason I led off with it, is because reading it as a teenager was how I learned that underpants had not always been as commonly used as they were in my own time. It was kind of a disturbing revelation. What made it more disturbing, was that it wasn't something people really came right out and discussed directly. You had to piece the information together out of lewd hints, and naughty, embarrassing stories. There are stories out there about Queen Catherine of France, spanking the bare bottoms of her serving women, for instance, or one creepy, perverted story that I read in The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, about how as a boy, he once hid behind some bushes and watched peasant women peeing on the ground while they were standing together talking.

The reality is much simpler (and much less gross) though: Ladies began wearing undergarments that covered their butts in the Nineteenth Century. Actually, they did not cover their butts, as cotton undergarments of the time were were split down the middle in back, as in this image:

While the long woolen kind, called union suits, had patch-openings in back to let the butt out, so a lady could go to the bathroom without having to do too much adjustment to her elaborate clothing.

Under-drawers were a cost-saving measure, a way of keeping one's outer clothes for longer. Gentlemen took to wearing them sooner than ladies, for this very reason: They wore close-fitting britches, which rubbed up against their butts and various other smelly parts of their bodies, and which were frequently made out of various expensive materials such as satin or embroidered velvet. Some of those probably couldn't even be cleaned safely, and certainly it would have been cheaper even for the ones that could, to save yourself having to do it very often, by wearing some nice linen or woolen undergarments underneath.

Ladies on the other hand, wore nice, loose-skirted gowns, that let lots of air get in, to freshen up all their smelly places. They wore chemises under their dresses, which basically protected the underarm area and the torso, in case things started getting sweaty there. They wore corsets, depending on the style of the time, to make their waists look slim and pretty.

But it wasn't until improvements in textile manufacture made cotton fabric (for under-drawers), and woolen knit fabric (for union suits) easy to afford, that they bothered wearing garments that covered places no one was going to see anyway, garments that were, after all, only going to need cleaning themselves as well as the other cleaning that already needed to be done.

At that as I have said, they wore undergarments that were open in the back. This was probably because, with all the clothes Victorian ladies were already having to shift around at the time, they didn't want to make getting to the bathroom any more difficult than it already was. It does make you think though, that it probably saved on the washing, if a lady wasn't extra-careful when she was wiping herself. -- Remember, you wiped your butt with dry corncobs in the old days, or with pages from the Sears Catalog, not with nice, pillowy-soft Charmin.

It's also amusing to think though, that the crotch-less panties your friends all thought were so naughty that they had to pile them on you for presents, "for the honeymoon," at your wedding shower, were just normal everyday wear for all ladies, back in the Victorian Age.

It wasn't until the end of the Nineteenth Century that women started wearing under-drawers that were sewn up in back as well as in front. French can-can dancers, were the first ones to do it; just because they made a living showing themselves off in front of an audience, didn't mean they wanted to show everything, to every man who paid for a seat (maybe they charged more for the good stuff, one-on-one).



As usually happens, it wasn't long until regular ladies wanted to copy the styles the loose women had started. By the 1920's, closed panties were the only kinds still being sold. Ladies found them useful, because with skirts being shorter, it was way, way easier for what was underneath to show by accident. All it took was a stray breeze:

Or an extra-wild night out, dancing with your boyfriend:

And you were going to be awfully glad Sears wasn't selling those split-panties any more.

HyperSmash