Secrets From Your Sister

The thong was originally a men’s garment, believe it or not. It is one of the earliest recorded clothing styles, used to protect men’s genetalia in sub-Saharan Africa, where clothing was first worn 75 000 years ago.  Tribal peoples, such as the Khoisan people of Southern Africa, wore thongs for many centuries.

Fashion designer Rudi Gernreich was credited with introducing the modern thong in 1974 which grew in popularity in South America, especially in Brazil. In the 1990s, the thong began to gain widespread acceptance and popularity in the United States, amounting for sales of more than $2 billion per year in 2006.  Popular culture icons such as the ladies of Baywatch and Britney Spears helped push sales of the thong to the masses.

Recent surveys place the number of American women who wear thongs as their preferred underwear style at 28%. While thongs are available for girls as young as eight years^, it is common for parents to not approve of girls wearing them until they reach their teens. We tend to agree on this point. Perhaps though, that’s another blog topic altogether.

Many reasons exist why women may choose to wear thong underwear: prevention of visible panty lines; prevention of ride up so one needn’t pull at one’s underwear in public; comfort; fashion consciousness, including the feeling of being more adult; saving storage space during travels.

In our stores we’ve noticed that the thong has recently taken a back seat (pun intended) to the boyshort. It was noted in the Times Online UK in 2005 that thong sales had fallen dramatically – nearly 17% that year. The trend had moved away from more revealing garments towards more comfortable options, such as the boyshort. Certainly this is the trend we’ve experienced as well, though we do have a strong and loyal following of thong-lovers who shop in our store. To each her own!

Boyshorts are cute and comfortable and in many cases eliminate visible panty and visible thong lines, as they lay seamlessly flat against the skin. We also find they are extremely flattering, so this is  another one of the reasons. If you’ve never tried a boyshort style, it is time!

But back to our topic: our most popular thong styles are by Cosabella and Commando because they are lower rise and sit comfortably below the waist band of jeans. No more ‘whale tail’ to worry about. They also have a comfortable stretch to them which allows you to move and bend without any uncomfortable pulling. We generally prefer a thong style when wearing tights – a bunched up pair of bikini or boyshort style undies under a pair of tights is never fun. Perhaps we are lingerie obsessed (perhaps is likely an understatement) but we find it best to mix it up and keep a variety of styles on hand to work with different clothing items.

Artist Emily Duffy created a giant bra ball reminiscent of the popular rubber band ball as an art project.

The amazing ball, which was completed in 2003, grew to be over five feet tall, weighs 1800 pounds and contains an amazing 18 085 bras. To create the ball the artist hooked the bras together end-to-end and began rolling them up. As the ball grew, it began to resemble an egg, then a globe, and perhaps even an ovary or breast. Women began to donate their bras to the project, and soon the ball was more than twice its originally planned size!

In the artist’s own words, “Breasts are often a source of conflicting emotions for women. Our personal body experiences are rarely reflected in media images we see. A woman may feel ashamed, proud, annoyed, and sexual about her breasts during just one menstrual cycle, or even a single day. Almost every woman has a bra story to tell. Some are traumatic, others joyful. A first bra is one of our culture’s rites of passage for women, yet it’s often a secret, mumbled between teenaged girls and their mothers in store dressing rooms.

Using bras as an art medium (something I’ve been doing for several years now) is a way of disrupting some of the longstanding taboos surrounding them.”

Learn more about the Bra Ball project at www.braball.com

A customer mentioned the other day that she’d heard that a man invented the bra. I didn’t really agree except to the statement that, men perhaps capitalized on the invention. The fact is that it is too hard to say WHO first invented the bra because women have always had breasts and have always been resourceful enough to find a way to best work with them.

One of the first known garments to have actually covered the breasts to control movement was called the “apodesme” later to be known as the “mamillare”, worn by Greek women who wanted to reduce breast movement in 450BC-285AD.

The newest form of the bra was originated in the late 1800′s by Herminie Cadolle. Her ‘corselet gorge’ premiered at the Grand Exposition in Paris and later the company became known as Cadolle Lingerie.

The first patent for a brassiere, a backless one, was granted to Mary Phelps Jacobs from the USA in 1914.

The history is fascinating and how the times affect how we hold up our bosoms will no doubt be an ongoing adventure!

I was excited to find a fun twist on the ‘male’ inventor… ‘Otto Titzling is a fictional character who is apocryphally described as the inventor of the brassiere.
The name, a pun on “tit-sling,” was invented by humorist Wallace Reyburn in the 1970s.’