Reawakening the Brief, and Other Unmentionables

As Elizabeth Ewing notes in Underwear: A History, underwear’s complete early history is relatively difficult to trace. Many of the sculptures, vases, relief paintings, and other remaining ephemera from the ancient world favour depictions of outerwear over underwear. Still, the first known example of the brief dates back to a Sumerian terracotta figure of a Babylonian girl from 3000 BC, which is housed in the Louvre. It is generally assumed that briefs were derived from the loincloth and worn by both women and men.

Like the brief, the bra is also an ancient item. According to Ewing, the Odyssey and the Iliad, and texts by Herodotus, Aristophanes, Cicero, and Lucian mention undergarments made for figure control, and variously refer to them as the zoné, the apodesmos, the mastodeton, and the strophium.

Underwear has over the years undergone huge technological and stylistic changes, from the first shape-maker found in a twelfth-century manuscript to the hoops and under-architectures of the Elizabethans, to the post-World War II fibre revolution. Its history has been affected by advances in outerwear, which in turn are often viewed as physical manifestations of socio-political and economic upheaval. We now know, for instance, that two-legged clothing emerged in the Western world in the fourth century AD, when the Roman Empire transferred its centre of power to the site of ancient Byzantium (which became Constantinople, and eventually Istanbul), closer to the trousers worn in Central Asia; similarly, an emphasis on the waist emerged only in the mid-twelfth century, its tighter contours permissible perhaps because of a weakened church in Western Europe and the burgeoning notion of romantic love.

For Nancy Elms there is no mistaking underwear’s importance. Elms has run Trés Jolie Fine Lingerie in Toronto for fifteen years, and has watched customers buy for all sorts of reasons: fetish fulfillment, marriage salvation, love, self-rewards, depression relief. “I could be a social worker,” she jokes, alluding to the stories she’s heard in the fitting room over the years. “I try to make people feel more positive.”

Not only is underwear psychologically important and historically significant, it’s perfect for the old semiological practice of inferring meaning from material culture—in this case what we wear. Lurie would argue that a red thong screams sex, that a brief announces an uptight wearer, that stable meanings are out there, waiting to be uncovered. Other ways of reading underwear, however, are much more ambiguous and flexible in their allowances for a variety of significations.

Recent scholars of material culture would agree that one person’s sexy thong might be another’s way of avoiding unsightly bottom lines. Another person’s briefs might be about originality or irony, not conservatism; for a man, they might simply be a way of protecting the “boys” from übertight slacks. Underwear can communicate in so many ways, its privacy defies conspicuous consumption and guarantees free expression. The personality of our unmentionables can be as extreme, daring, frilly, practical, and ironic as we wish; our public facades need not convey the material secrets underneath. Much like a conversation, material derives its meaning from contextual and personal experience, anchored in the associations we pick up along the way.

Not only do we speak with clothing, we also speak in tongues: there is an unresolvable contradiction in fashion between the desire to cover oneself up and the desire for attention. Psychologist J.C. Flügel was one of the earliest theorists to summarize this duality, writing in The Psychology of Clothes that our attitude toward garments is ambivalent. But whatever the message may be, looking at underwear like this is actually a survivalist’s template, a technique that can be used to reappreciate material culture rather than simply feeling overwhelmed and entrapped by it. Something as simple and omnipresent as a brief can simultaneously link us to 3000 BC and to contemporary designers balancing their way through fashion’s contradictions.

The fitter stood back to admire her work. We had found my perfect set. Thousands upon thousands of years of material evolution had produced a design that at that very moment epitomized my material ambivalence—sexual comfort, see-through coverage, stringy utility, it was all there. I left with a small, pink paper bag containing one perfect loincloth and one matching strophium.