Out in Paperback / An Intimate Affair

An Intimate Affair -- Women, Lingerie, and Sexuality by Jill Fields, UCal Press '07, $21.95, 375 pages, ISBN #0520252616. Index, source notes, no bibliography, b&w images sprinkled through text.

"Clothes," wrote Virginia Woolf in 1928, "are but a symbol of something hid deep beneath." In her new work, Cal State University historian Jill Fields interprets for her readers how the history of undergarments (or the lack thereof) is reflective of the changing zeitgeist of the times. But her findings are sometimes counter-intuitive. Would we expect, for example, that a popular undergarment during the Victorian Era was open-crotch drawers?

Fields's narrative divides into seven sections, examining: Drawers, Corsets and Girdles, Brassieres, The Meaning of Black Lingerie, advertising for intimate apparel, the garment industry and union culture, and the return of the repressed (waist). The book features more than 70 illustrations, some of them quite striking, to wit: Marlene Dietrich in Blonde Venus, Jean Harlow in Double Whoopee, and a plethora of brassiere and lingerie ads. And yes, such titillating anecdotes as Howard Hughes inventing a bra for actress Jane Russell to enhance her natural endowments are revisited.