Underwear

thumb| Underwear, underclothing, or undergarments are items of clothing worn beneath outer clothes, usually in direct contact with the skin, although they may comprise more than a single layer. They serve to keep outer clothing from being soiled or damaged by bodily excretions, to lessen the friction of outerwear against the skin, to shape the body, and to provide concealment or support for parts of it. Quotes Brevity is the soul of lingerie, as the Petticoat said to the Chemise. Dorothy Parker, in Vogue (1916); reported in John Keats, You Might as Well Live (1970), p. 32 At the period to which this narrative refers the school contained perhaps thirty girls of the junior category; that is to say, children wearing petticoats short enough to display some portion of their drawers; and twenty elder pupils, wearing long skirts, and whose "pantalettes" were consequently only visible to the eye of the profane vulgar when they were walking on the Marine Parade, and when the wind blew very high. But that every one of her girls, little and big, should wear drawers of some kind or another was part of Miss Sinclair's code of laws, and those laws were as those of the Medes and Persians. Thus there were little minxes whose breeches only reached to the knee, and others whose trowsers only came mid-leg, and a few who wore the old fashioned drawers, which came down to the ancle, and well nigh covered the boot. Some of the elder girls wore drawers almost as tight as nun's [sic] pantaloons, and whole seated—that is to say not slit up the back. These buttoned at the sides, and necessitated the letting down of a hinder flap when the wearer went to the watercloset. Others, again, patronised "knickerbocker" drawers of crimson or purple flannel—Zouave breeches in fact, secured by an "elastic" at the knee—but the majority of the elder girls wore the ordinary undergarments of English ladies, young and old, linen or longcloth "tongs," slit up the front and the back, tying round the waist with a string, the drawers themselves reaching to the middle of the calf of the leg, and decorated at the extremities with several "tucks," or with embroidery or "insertion."   One girl, Miss Montes, from Cuba, a "big one," wore regular Turkish drawers of transparent gauze, which bagged down to her ancles. She had brought three dozen pairs of these curious inexpressibles with her from Havana. "They were useful," she said, "in the Tropics, as a protection against mosquitoes." The Mysteries of Verbena House (1882), p. 7 The greatest enemy to a woman's chastity is contact. Let her wear her things loose, and she may keep her blood cool. Nuns—continental ones at least—don't wear drawers. Peasant women, who are chaste enough as times go, don't wear drawers; and when they stoop you may see the bare flesh of their thighs above their ungartered stockings. But the bigger the whore—professional or otherwise—the nicer will be the drawers she wears, while the prude, or the cantankerous old maid will either wear the most hideous breeches imaginable, or none at all. I positively knew a lady once who not only repudiated drawers herself, but would not allow her daughters to wear them.   "They were immodest," she said. And so they are. They bring into immediate contact with a woman something belonging to the opposite sex.   When drawers are made of linen, and are bifurcated at the bottom and belly, they are feminised to an extent which may neutralise the elements I have spoken of; although, as far as I am concerned, it tickles me some—what when I look from the windows of a railway carriage into suburban back gardens to see the white drawers of women hung to dry on clothes lines, and fluttering in the breeze. My imagination fills the empty galligaskins with cosy bottoms and hirsute quims. Were those drawers loquacious, like Tennyson's "Talking Oak," what mysteries might they not reveal.   A lady, putting on her riding trousers becomes, consciously or unconsciously, akin to a hoyden assuming man's clothes, or nearer still, to a ballet girl drawing on her tights. She is subject to contact of the most perilous kind. The warm close substance that passes close to her flesh, that clasps her loins, and embraces her bum, and insinuates itself between her thighs, has, all senseless leather, cloth, or silk, as the case may be, something of the nature of a man's hand in it.   Let the graces be stark naked, or vest them only with flowing drapery, and they may be as chaste as Susannah. Put them in drawers or tights and they become prostitutes.   If Diana had gone a hunting in trousers of "chamois leather with black feet," she would not have behaved, I take it, quite so savagely to poor Actæon. The Mysteries of Verbena House (1882), p. 23 External links Category:Clothing