Louisa Young
BODY LANGUAGE
Product placement has never had it so good. According to underwear manufacturers Hanro, the Egyptian cotton camisole worn by Nicole Kidman in a scene from the Stanley Kubrick epic Eyes Wide Shut has been a hit all over the world. As the film opens in each country, sales of the skimpy item rocket. Kidman wears it in a sex confession scene with her real-life and screen husband Tom Cruise, which “might have charged the camisole with more emotion in the minds of our customers”, the Swiss firm’s representative explains.
It’s a lovely idea, isn’t it, the emotionally charged camisole? So daft, yet so very appealing. Underwear, more than any other garment, can be horribly significant. (I make exception for the wedding dress, quod vide Miss Havisham, but then imagine her wedding underwear: the tragic dusty lace, the garter with its dead elastic, the rotting whalebone in her stays. Miss Havisham’s camisole, I contend, is more emotionally charged than Kidman’s.)
Allowing your underwear to become emotionally charged can be risky, inconvenient and expensive. A friend reports how a gentleman once said to her, in a first moment of disrobing that had revealed a workaday if gorgeous black bra: “Were you thinking of me when you put that on?” She didn’t know what to say. “No, the idea of disrobing in front of you hadn’t crossed my mind”? Or: “No, I always wear nice underwear”? Or: “Yes, I’ve been dreaming of this moment”?
She found herself eyeing the bra with suspicion on subsequent occasions. Who was she putting it on for? Was it a pulling kind of a bra? Was it innately sexy, even though she herself wasn’t feeling particularly sexy? It always reminded her of him and later, when she fell in love with someone else, she had to put it away altogether because it brought the first man into the bedroom whenever she wore it.
I had a similar problem with a pair of green stockings. A rich friend chucks out lingerie wholesale each time a romance fails. Another, with two boyfriends, has divided her underwear in half, so she doesn’t wear the same things with both of them because, she says, it makes her feel uncomfortable. The suggestion that by this argument she should get an extra body didn’t go down well.
I have a pink and orange bra and knickers: quite beautiful, balconette style, with little flowers embroidered round the edge. The word balconette itself provokes so many images: breasts leaning over the edge of their balconette as Juliet leans over the balcony by moonlight yearning for Romeo … Anyway, I confess I bought them with a particular Romeo in mind and wore them, for the first time, on the night it all went wrong. The emotional charge that resulted was enough to stop me wearing them for a while.
It wasn’t so much the simple fact of it all going wrong that infused them with the impossibility-to-wear factor as the memory of the hubris that had made me buy them in the first place. How cocky was I, to go out feeling secure and happy enough to buy new underwear with him in mind? Too cocky, that’s how cocky. Looking back, during the “I can’t ever wear these again” phase, I felt it served me right for relaxing into some kind of sense that of course he would be seeing them, for assuming … Ah well, he never saw them and I tell you it’s his loss.
You can see I’m over that phase now. I’ve also passed through the “I’m damned if I’m going to waste these because of you” stage into the “My underwear is so gorgeous and it’s all for me because nobody knows” period. This is especially funny because you think you are operating with all this “hidden confidence”, as the magazines call it when they’re talking about good fit, uplift and expensive knickers, and then it turns out that there’s nothing hidden about it at all.
Women – and it’s women, not men – cotton on very quickly. Especially in summer and especially in these days of visible bra strap acceptability. One flash of pink and orange satin, or a bit of crimson flower and a pearl at your cleavage, and you’re off on a conversation that begins: “Is that by Freya? Or is it Agent Provocateur?” Before you know it, you’re swapping addresses so you can put her on the mailing list for the Bravissimo catalogue.
This new role as icebreaker among women finally redeemed the pink and orange ensemble, when it provided that key bonding moment with a nice new female friend who is more fun than Romeo ever was anyway. For example, she, being female, would get the point of the bra’s history, whereas he would never have understood. Which only goes to show: never underestimate the social and emotional properties of underwear.