Saturday, May 29, 2010

What's Underneath?

This is an entirely frivolous, analysis-free post, inspired by Bianca writing about tennis undies, sparked by Venus Williams's latest flesh-colored ones.

"Venus Williams cruises into French Open" 26 May 2010.
I think she looks terrific!

The topic reminds me of the surprising (to me) scanty Syrian skivvies, modeled in a modest way by Eastern European women, to get around censorship.
Syria's Underwear, from Spiegel (4/17/2009). They're mostly bought by female friends and relatives as gifts for brides.

You never know with religions...

Meanwhile, devout Mormons wear these night and day.

But I was disappointed to read in What Mormons Believe: Underwear that there's nothing magical about Mormon "garments" [sort of an urban myth, I guess]; they just serve as a reminder of one's relationship with God.

What undies did George Washington wear?
The Colonial Williamsburg site says that the long linen shirt was men's main underwear, but they sometimes wore underdrawers to line their knee-length breeches.


And here's the changing fashion in women's petticoats, 1742-1794


(Remember David Beckham's underwear ad?)

6 comments:

femminismo said...

whoa! i shouldn't have visited the Bend it like Beckham page! gotta take a cool shower now.

Ginga Squid said...

....damn, me too!

I still haven't managed to kick the habit of wearing huge 'Bridget Jones' knickers after having my kids! Glad Venus kind of wears the same...

Marz said...

O hey. Taking Sunday off from taking blogging off, (gGod did it, after all).

I'm kind of surprised underwear hasn't become obsolete; with Syria's Underwear especially, it seems like more of an embellishment than anything else.

Were you to post that first photo on ontd or a similarly fannish site, you would get 17 prompt responses, all of them:

"DAT ASS."

And I don't even know what feverish utterances of fan-speak would come from Beckham's ad.
Maybe a new, biblical one that I think could either take off or flop:

JESUS WEPT.

momo said...

Margeret, did you know there is an ontd_football? their tags include "oh god please yes!" and "bulgemasters" and the argument is over whether Cristiano Ronaldo's Armani ads are better than the Calvin Klein ones.

Marz said...

!!!!

I just paid a visit to ontd_football; it's like a different dialect of Fannish; I felt like I'd been propelled into some sort of squee-ish mirror-verse!

And there's football slash.
That's amazing.
I mean, I don't even follow football, (it took me a few minutes to realize "oh, it's European football!"), but it's hard not to get excited, just on the principle that lots of other people are.

And them boys are awful pretty.

To test the contagious power of enthuse, someone should start something like ontd_fruit, or ontd_sewing. The new fan-speaks that would sprout there....I can't even imagine.

In short:
MY MIND. SHE IS BLOWN.

Fresca said...

FISMO & GINGA: Yeah, he's a sight to behold, all right.

Bridget Jones knickers! Too funny. I doubt that's what Venus had in mind, eh?

M'ET/MOMO: How bout "DAT JESUS"?

I don't know if I dare open ontd_football...

Everything I came up with for ontd_fill-in-the-blank started to take on a lascivious overtone.