Bra and Panties - Underwear Online

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The first pair of bra and panties may well have been sported by female athletes in Rome. There’s a mosaic dating from 400 C.E. in the Imperial Villa in Sicily’s Piazza Armeria which suggests as much. Liberating as those forward thinking undergarments may have been, the athletes would certainly have benefited from the technological advances which we have witnessed – most of all the advent of the revolutionary fibres nylon and lycra. These fabrics have made the lingerie sets we wear more comfortable, more durable, cheaper and easier to manufacture - and often more adventurous.

Lycra arrived at the end of the 1950s, just over two decades after nylon. Lycra was more elastic and stronger than latex. Its invention, combined with new high-temperature treatments (the technology was borrowed from the aerospace industry) made it possible to make the seamless moulded bras and panties beloved of the 1970s and still popular today. It also became easier to make bigger but still supportive bras. These techniques helped to reinforce the growing interest in cradling and enhancing rather than squeezing and altering the natural female shape: gradually the corset, then the girdle, became obsolete.

There are more and more new fabrics and techniques flooding the world of lingerie manufacture, making possible things that could never have been done before. Millesia’s leather and lycra line, designed to be much easier to wear than pure leather, is a good example. That’s not to say that lingerie makers don’t honour the old ways though. Many of the big lingerie houses, particularly the French ones, are over a hundred years old and treasure the philosophy and aesthetic sensibilities which led to their birth. Cadolle, whose Paris boutique is frequented by the likes of Isabelle Adjani, is run by Poupie, a fourth-generation family member who reintroduced a gentler form of the corset in the mid-1980s.

Not everyone, however, sees the technological progress of lingerie as an unadulterated march towards freedom. Bra and panty sets may be less constraining than a corset but you could still follow Germaine Greer’s example and wear neither. The Australian feminist has long been suspicious of the cultural conditioning which leads women to wear undergarments, particularly sexy ones: what is the push up brassiere but a fetishistic garment? Whether you agree with this (and Greer’s other opinions) or not, it is quite uplifting to picture the young Germaine’s Italian lover cursing at her refusal to wear underwear. She may not have bought many bra and panty sets in her life, but she is a cultural icon.

 

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