50Underwear Interior

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i l l u s t r a t e d b y

a b a r e - a l l h i s t o r y


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This book is the third in the 50 Questions series.Text 2011 Tanya Lloyd KyiIllustrations 2011 Ross Kinnaird

Annick Press Ltd.

All rights reserved. No part of this work covered by the copyrights hereon may be reproduced or used in anyform or by any meansgraphic, electronic, or mechanicalwithout prior written permission of the publisher.

Edited by Catherine MarjoribanksCopyedited by Gillian WattsProofread by Tanya TraffordCover and interior design by Irvin Cheung / iCheung Design, inc.Cover illustration by Ross KinnairdVintage Jockey ad, p 61: Image provided courtesy of Jockey International, Inc. Jockey International, Inc.Used with Permission.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and theGovernment of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) for our publishing activities.

Cataloging in Publication

Kyi, Tanya Lloyd, 1973-50 underwear questions : a bare-all history / Tanya Lloyd Kyi ; illustrated by Ross Kinnaird.

(50 questions series)Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 978-1-55451-352-9 (pbk.).ISBN 978-1-55451-353-6 (bound)

1. UnderwearJuvenile literature. 2. UnderwearHistoryJuvenile literature. I. Kinnaird, Ross, 1954-

II. Title. III. Title: Fifty underwear questions. IV. Series: 50 questions series

GT2073.K95 2011 j391.42 C2011-901701-6

Printed and bound in China

Published in the U.S.A. by Distributed in Canada by Distributed in the U.S.A. byAnnick Press (U.S.) Ltd. Fire y Books Ltd. Fire y Books (U.S.) Inc.

66 Leek Crescent P.O. Box 1338Richmond Hill, ON Ellicott StationL4B 1H1 Buffalo, NY 14205

Visit our website at www.annickpress.com

Visit Tanya Lloyd Kyi at www.tanyalloydkyi.com


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For the DGs, of course. T.K.

For Hannah Mary Kinnaird R.K.


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Acknowledgments

Thanks go to John Cronce and Jockey International for the use of theadvertisement that appears on page 61. Also to Catherine Marjoribanksand Gillian Watts, editors extraordinaire, and to designer Irvin Cheung.


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2

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2

We all own it. We all wear it. We all wash it. (At least, I hope wedo!) So why do we know so little about our underwear? Every morning,we pull on our briefs, boxers, or panties without thinking. We might evenassume that were wearing the same skivvies people have been wearingfor centuries. But thats not true!

Underwear was invented way back when cave-dwellers wrappedscraps of leather around their waists. Weve come a long way from the

loincloths of those ancestors. Since their time, underwear has evolvedinto something that can straighten, shape, warm, wad, squish, or stuff us. Men have worn tights and garters, breeches and suspenders, Y-frontsand briefs, and even wool full-body suits under their clothes. Women

I n t r o d u c t i o n

S N e A k i N g

P e E k A


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Sneaking a Peek 3

have worn petticoats, crinolines, corsets, bloomers, girdles, bras, and, yes,thongs.

Even though these items are mostly tucked out of sight, they man-age to affect the way people walk and the way they work. Around theworld, underwear can even re ect the values of societies, symbolizinghow people view their bodies and the bodies of others.

The following pages unwrap the answers to all sorts of undercover

questions. Each chapter is a sneak peek at a historical period, and all to-gether they form a timeline from the days of saber-toothed tigers to thehigh-fashion world of modern lingeriea timeline that stretches throughthe centuries like a very long piece of waistband elastic.


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4

When you think of mummi ed bodies, you might picture their forms wrapped in long, Halloween-style linenstrips. Would you believe that underneath their wraps,some mummies are wearing underwear? The preservedbodies of Egyptian pharaohs show us what people of theMediterranean wore thousands of years ago. And the

frozen remains of an ice-age hunter reveal much about

primeval European fashion.Its not easy to trace the history of clothing, becausecloth usually disintegrates over time. Along with mummies,scientists study sculptures, paintings, and surviving cultural

traditions to help determine what our ancestors wore in the distant past.

C h a p t e r 1

A n c i e n t

U n d i e s


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5

Imagine youre hiking through theAlps and you stumble across . . . a deadbody! Thats what happened to twoGerman backpackers in 1991. Whenthey found a torso sticking out of the ice,they thought someone had been murdered.They called the police. Soon authorities wereon the mountain with jackhammers and icepicks, digging out the victim.

It turned out there had been a murdertheman had been shot with a stone arrow. But no arrests were made. Afterall, the body was more than 3000 years old!

The iceman had been miraculously preserved by the ice, and heoffered researchers all sorts of information about prehistoric underwear.He was dressed in deerskin snow boots, leather-and-fur leggings, and agoatskin loincloth. Sewn together with animal sinew, the loincloth hungfrom a leather belt at the front, was tucked between his legs, and wasattached to the belt at the back.

These items gave scientists informationabout the climate 3000 years ago, about thetechnologies known to the icemans people(sewing, for example), and about the waysearly Europeans wore their undies.

D o e s a n y o n e f e e l a c h i l l ?


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6 50 Underwear Questions

W h a t s t h

e

l a t e s t i n l o i n c l o

t h s ?

The iceman wasnt the only one wearing a loincloth. Many ancientsocieties developed their own variations of leather or cloth worn betweenthe legs and held around the waist. Loincloths were easy to make, they werewarm, and they protected sensitive regions from scrapes and prickles.

In some places, such as ancient Egypt, both men and women woreloincloths. In other cultures, women developed their own adaptations.

Also, different types were worn in different parts of the world, depend-ing on the climate and the available materials. In North America, somenative peoples wore loincloths made from deerskin. Farmers in Chinawore loincloths made of hemp, while the Inca of South America worellama wool or animal fur. Mayan men made theirs out of a cloth wovenfrom tree bark.

Styles varied as well. Until the early 1900s, Japanese men wore a longstrip of cloth called a undoshi . This was designed to be wrapped around

the hips, twisted in the back, then drawn between the legs to tuck into thefront waistband, leaving extra cloth to hang over the top like an apron.

Today we might think that loincloths look like ancient boxer-briefs.But they werent actually worn underneath anythingthey were moreouterwear than underwear. Only in cold climates might a shawl or pon-cho be added overtop.


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In ancient Egypt, pharaohs were buried with gold,pets, furniture, and even slaveseverything they

might need to live as rich men in the afterlife. In1352 BCE, the pharaoh Tutankhamen was entombedwith 145 loincloths for his future use.

Hopefully Tuts celestial slaves have beendoing his laundry. If not, hes only had a pair of clean undies every couple of decades since he died.

Themawashi worn by modern Japanese sumo wrestlers is astylized form of loincloth. Its oftentied very tightly and sprinkled withwater so that its too slippery foran opponent to grab.


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8 50 Underwear Questions

Found in a cave in southern France, the Venus of Lespugue is a rotundgurine depicting an exaggerated womans body. She was carved from

an ivory tusk between 26,000 and 24,000 years ago. And shes wearingunderwear.

Well, actually, shes wearing some woven strings around her waistshowing that the people who carved the gurine were some of the rstin the world to begin twisting and weaving threads together to form

clothing.The gurines woven garment is a form of cache-sexe . Thats a Frenchword for something that hides the genitals. Basically, a cache-sexe is thegirl version of a loincloth. Early cache-sexes have been found at a burialsite in Denmark, where women from3000 years ago wore wraparoundwool skirts. An excavation in Malihas revealed a layered, fringed belt

made of woven tree bark. These kindsof skirts may have been for warmthor for decoration, but anthropologistsbelieve they were also symbols, wornto show that a girl had reached adult-hood and was ready to bear children.

I f y o u s e e V e n u s a n d y o u s e e F r a n c e ?

In a few ancient civilizations,woman also wore bras. Butnot the kind of bras we wouldrecognize today. In Rome, womenwore bands of cloth or leatherwrapped around their breasts,but outside their tunics.


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Ancient Undies 9

A r e l o i n c l o t h s l a d y l i k e ?

Psst . . . is that girl single? Is she married? Ask her how old she is. Can you pass her this note and fnd out where her village is?

If you were a young man in ancient Papua New Guinea and you hadyour eye on a particular girl, you wouldnt need all that whispering andnote-passing. You could get answers to all your questions just by lookingat her maro . This rectangular piece of fabric, made from tree bark and

elaborately painted and stenciled, was worn around the waist and tiedwith a belt.As children, girls ran naked through their villages. When they reached

puberty, they received their rst maro , which covered them from waistto mid-thigh. Each girl received a new, differently painted maro on herwedding nightone she would wear for the rest of her life to mark herstatus as a married woman.

Today, visitors to Papua New Guinea are more likely to see a maro in

the tourist marketplace than wrapped around a womans waist. The tree-bark fabric has become a symbol of local culture, but the history of themaro stretches far into the ancient past. Its a relative of the loinclothsand wraparound skirts worn by women in Polynesia, South America,and Africa.


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10 50 Underwea r Questions

H o w d o e s

a l o i n c l o t h

t r a v e l ?

Its in this months Vogue!

I saw it on Entertainment Tonight !Its what all the trend-watchers are blogging about!

Today we have magazines, TV shows, and the Internet to bring usthe latest fashion trends from around the world. In ancient times, ideastraveled much more slowly. It was more like Hmmm . . . those foreignsailors at the docks are wearing something strange, or Have you seenthe clothes on those caravan camel-drivers?

A new loincloth style might take generations to spread just from oneside of the Mediterranean to the other. Today, historians are trying totrace how one clothing idea led to the next.

From carvings and paintings, we know that people wore skirt-likeloincloths in ancient Egypt. Etruscan people on the north side of theMediterranean, where Italy is today, probably adapted the Egyptian style.Then the Romans took over. They called their loincloth a subligaculum ,

At puberty, an Arawet girl of Brazil isgiven a wide cotton waistbanda sortof woven beltto wear under herskirt. She wears this same waistbanduntil her death, just as her ancestorshave done for centuries. Because itsconsidered private, the waistband israrely taken off. And unlike other Arawetclothing, waistbands arent handeddown to new wearers.


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Ancient Undies 11

but it was basically the same underwear by anothername. It was a large, roughly triangular piece of fab-ric wrapped around the waist, then tucked between

the legs and under a belt.Farmers wore subligacula in the elds and gladi-ators wore them when they fought in the Coliseum.Soldiers wore them underneath knee-length tunics.Even politicians may have worn them underneaththeir tunics or togas.

Chilly? You could pull on a pairof leg warmers below yoursubligaculum . But only if youwere an old man. Otherwise,youd have to learn to say

fashion faux pas in ancientLatin.


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Picture a battlefield. Its 102 BCE, and the Romansare stabbing their short swords at an army of Teutonic warriors. Theres just one problem with this picture. The Romans are basically battling indressesknee-length tunics with a loincloth underneath. The Teutonsare leaping around in shirts and shorts.

Who was faster?

In this case, the Romans won the war. But it wasnt because of theirdresses! As soon as they got home, in fact, they started wearing shortertunics. Underneath, they pulled on long, baggy underwearkind of likecoarse brown basketball shorts. This style gave them more freedom torun and ght and ride.

By studying ancient books and artwork, historians can see how thesenewfangled shorts, known as breeches, slowly spread across Europe.Roman records show that craftspeople were at work making breeches by

the fth century. And eleventh-century illustrations show farmers strip-ping off their outer clothes in the hot elds and working in their clothundies. These shorts were tied at the waist with a cord, and also cinchedaround the upper calves. Medieval knights wore breeches like this undertheir armor, and aristocrats wore them under their tunics.

Ca n you ba t t le in those b r e e che s ?


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M en in P ers ia ma y ha v e a un t ed d i v id ed pa n t s w e l

l b e f or e

t h e ir Europ ea n coun t e rpa r t s. ( Jus t t h ink o f Ala dd in s pu f f y

s ilk pa n t s w i t h dra ws t r ings a t t h e a nkl es. ) Som e h is t or ia n

s

sugg es t t ha t t h e Roma ns borro w ed t h is ga rm en t id ea f ro

m

t h e P e rs ia ns , no t t h e T eu t ons , a nd t h en t urn ed t h e loos e

t rous e rs in t o und e rpa n t s.

13


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HOW TO DRESS LIKE A GLADIATOI your mom or grandma has a large triangular shawl(pre erably with tassels), you can try tying your own subligaculum .

Spread the shawl behind you, hanging onto two corners and letting thethird corner drop toward the foor.Pull the top two corners around you and tie them at your belly button.Grab the bottom corner rom between your legs and pull it in ront o you,tucking it under the knot at your belly button.

Let the extra material hang in ront o the knot.Fasten a belt around your hips to hold your subligaculum in place.Now all you need to be a gladiator is a coliseum, a weapon, some hungrylions, and a ew thousand rabid ans.


50Underwear Interior

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