An Intimate Affair: Women, Lingerie, and Sexuality

by Jill Fields

Intimate apparel, a term in use by 1921, has played a crucial role in the development of the "naughty but nice" feminine ideal that emerged in the twentieth century. Jill Fields's engaging, imaginative, and sophisticated history of twentieth-century lingerie tours the world of women's intimate apparel and arrives at nothing less than a sweeping view of twentieth-century women's history via the undergarments they wore. Illustrated throughout and drawing on a wealth of evidence from fashion magazines, trade periodicals, costume artifacts, Hollywood films, and the records of organized labor, An Intimate Affair is a provocative examination of the ways cultural meanings are orchestrated by the "fashion-industrial complex," and the ways in which individuals and groups embrace, reject, or derive meaning from these everyday, yet highly significant, intimate articles of clothing.

Genres: Fashion, History, Feminism, Nonfiction, Sexuality

392 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

Reviews

[Charles · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't completely buy all the now-standard rhetoric about the male gaze (as though it's a one-way street) and the assumption that all men objectify all women but not the reverse (so, uh, what happens when you're talking about gay men gazing at women [or men:] and gay women gazing at women [or men:]?). Nonetheless, the explanation of how fashion history has intersected with political, economic, and world history of the l9th and 20th centuries was interesting. Even better were the chapters on women's presence in the garment-making unions and on feminist artists' making use of lingerie as part of their artworks. That last chapter has pointed me toward a number of artists I want to find out more about.

[Vanessa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fantastic, fantastic, fantastic, if a little high-brow. Fields intertwines the cultural meaning of black lingerie, desire for more racialized sexuality, and the twin desires of sexuality/mortality with grace and poise in her chapter on black undergarments. Some parts can be quite dry, but she makes good use of feminist film theory (Mulvey) and Lacanian psychoanalysis in evaluating public images of lingerie.

Women used to wear drawers with slits! Their very PURPOSE in life was boiled down to underwear. It's nutty.