Book review: “The Virtues of Underwear: Modesty, Flamboyance and Filth” by Nina Edwards

In Jane Russell’s first movie role in 1943, her bra was the star, even though it didn’t seem to be there. The publicity posters for The Outlaw, directed by Howard Hughes, showed Russell lying on a haystack apparently braless, and her cleavage was so striking that, for five years, censors blocked the film from release. “The girl’s breasts are shockingly emphasized,” said the Production Code Administration. One judge said her breasts “hung like a thunderstorm over a summer landscape.”

As Nina Edwards relates in The Virtues of Underwear: Modesty, Flamboyance and Filth, Russell was wearing a bra, but she had lined it with tissues to hide the seams from showing through her shirt. The controversy ensured that the film, when finally released, would be a huge moneymaker.

Jane Austen, in her letters to her sister in the early 1800s, had a lot to say about underwear, such as how, with modern corsets, “the stays now are not made to force the Bosom up at all, that was a very unbecoming, unnatural fashion.”

A little more than a century later, another future novelist, twenty-year-old Barbara Pym, wrote in her diary: “At Marks and Spencer I bought a peach coloured vest and trollies [knickers] to match with insertions of lace. Disgraceful I know, but I can’t help choosing my underwear with a view to it being seen.”

 

“Like figureheads on a galleon”

Underwear can stir the emotions by how it feels and how it looks — and how it may be looked at. It can be thought of as a vehicle for empowerment and for enslavement, for embarrassment and for outrage.

In The Virtues of Underwear, published by the British firm of Reaktion and distributed by the University of Chicago Press, Edwards writes of the triumph of the push-up Wonderbra in the 1980s and 1990s, especially on the bodies of supermodels.

The familiar images of Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, Claudia Schiffer and the like in advertisements and on the catwalk with their splendid hoisted-up breasts seem like figureheads on a galleon, like Neptune’s angels in the age of so-called power-dressing, when the support of an accentuating bra was essential.

 

“Pantsdrunk” and G-strings

Edwards writes that male underwear, especially old items, can be a source of derision, indicating someone who is perhaps lonely and depressed. In fact, in Finland, there is a term “pantsdrunk” which describes a man who drinks alone at home in his underwear.

Men’s underwear, for the most part, is selected for its practicality and is “worn until it falls apart.,” she reports. Underwear for men, generally, doesn’t have the erotic allure that female underwear can have. For example, she writes: “Handkerchiefs, socks and sensible underwear are still customarily considered the most acceptable presents for brothers, fathers, husbands and sons.”

While male underwear today has gotten more varied and colorful, the range for women, writes Edwards, is much greater—“from wide-legged, two-part and open crotched drawstring knickers all the way to G-strings, and from Brazilians that are cut away at the back so that the lower part of the bottom is left uncovered to tanga briefs that occupy a half-way house between the thong and regular briefs.” And she adds:

G-strings are about as uncomfortable as cheese wire, with little more than a cord or flex between the legs, which can irritate the skin and exacerbate infections such as cystitis, though they do have the advantage of drawing attention to what they pretend to conceal.

 

Corsets and ugly babies

In The Theory of the Leisure Class, published in 1899, sociologist Thorstein Veblen argued that the elaborate, highly constraining corsetry of upper-class women’s clothing was deliberately impractical. It was seen by him, Edwards writes, as a way that men could display their wealth indirectly—by showing that they could afford elegantly dressed but useless women.

Writing a century earlier in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Woolstonecraft dismissed fashion as “a badge of slavery.” And Edwards reports:

The corset has been blamed for more than 97 ‘diseases,’ including consumption, epilepsy and even the birth of ugly children, though there is little evidence that not wearing corsets ensures the production of pretty ones.

In The Virtues of Underwear, Edwards isn’t aiming to prove a political or sociological point, except maybe that, for the past four thousand years, humans have had a great many mixed feelings and thoughts about the fabric they wear closest to their skin.

Her book is a meandering amble up and down the centuries, letting her inquisitive mind and sharp ear take her and her reader to many an odd little corner.

For instance, she reports that chastity belts apparently weren’t used by Crusaders to keep their wives faithful, nor were any bras burned during 1960s feminist protests. Both were hoaxes.

 

The various uses of the codpiece

On the other hand, men in the European courts of the 1500s did wear codpieces, also called braguettes, partly as a leftover kind of genital armor, partly as an element of swagger, and partly as a sort of purse in which to carry small items. And Edwards relates that in the Burgundian court, the codpiece had yet another use: The flagbearer “customarily supported his flag-pole by balancing it upon his protruding braguette.”

“Generally speaking, underwear is something we seldom chat about,” she notes. Yet, it’s one of those facts of modern life. And movies.

When, in 1985’s Back to the Future, Marty McFly travels back in time to meet his young parents, his mother calls him Calvin Klein. “It’s written all over your underwear.”  Two years earlier, in Flashdance, Jennifer Beals “manages to remove her bra from underneath a sweatshirt without taking the sweatshirt off first. This modest form of striptease is seductive because the item remains unseen until it has discreetly left the body.”

Underwear has played a role throughout history, from the additional undershirt that King Charles I of England wore to his execution to the underwear found on King Tut’s body, from the hairshirts of St. Francis of Assisi and Catherine of Siena to the loin cloths inaccurately painted on the body of Jesus and the two thieves in thousands of illustrations of the crucifixion.

A crucifixion would in fact have been carried out with the victims stripped naked, in order to maximize their public humiliation.

 

The arc of a human life — through underwear

Indeed, underwear can be used as a measure of the arc of a human’s life, Edwards writes:

An infant wears what it is given and the schoolchild puts up with underclothing that is perhaps too big or too small, to make it last as long as possible. The young lover has not got enough money to buy what would suit them best; the reputable grownup wears the underwear that suits their career and status. Once middle-aged, they find they no longer have a trim enough figure to look good in close-fitting underwear. Old age has under-clothing hanging upon their withered frame; and finally, in their dotage, they come full circle and revert to the disposable nappy.

The seven stages of man through our underpants.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

9.5.25

This review originally appeared at Third Coast Review on 9.8.25.