Detours in context (and a brief history of underwear)

What’s a woman doing with a pair of men’s underwear? To begin to answer that question, I’ll let you in on part of the backstory: this pair of underwear first belonged to Renee’s oldest son, who wore them as a 19-year-old in 2001.

This fact of their previous ownership situates the boxer-briefs within their intended context – use by men as a daily layer for warmth and hygiene. The history of undergarments is an array of practical, social, technological, and economic developments, but a condensed history pulled from a variety of online resources reveals the following about why people own and wear these things:

• In much of the ancient world, men (and in some cultures, women) wore loincloths to cover their genitals, either for protection or for modesty, as their only clothing – thus, not yet an “under”-garment.

• The fall of the Roman Empire was also the fall of the loincloth – what used to be a show of modesty was now considered uncivilized.

• People began to wear more clothing to cover themselves. Baggy swaths of folded fabric resembling diapers, followed by longer, pant-like “braies” in Medieval times, were used to protect the more-expensive outer layer. During the Renaissance era, braies lost their excess fabric, becoming more fitted and easier to wear under clothing.

• Such pants also necessitated the wearing of an undershirt, but by Victorian times the two were combined into the Union suit, a one-piece undergarment with long sleeves and legs.

• In the 20th century, pull-on boxers and briefs entered the market. Pre-shrunk material and a series of developments in the fabric industry (such as Rayon and Nylon) changed the fit mid-century and led to a new range of colors and patterns.

• As undergarments began reflecting fashion tastes as equally as functionality, underwear advertising attached concepts of sexuality and masculinity to clothing once worn for practicality and modesty.

This last context is the one in which Renee’s son wore his boxer-briefs. But the story does not end there – the briefs had a second, more idiosyncratic, life after Renee took ownership of them. In 2001, Renee was sent a box of her son’s belongings after he was arrested and imprisoned on drug charges; the box included an A-shirt, a pair of jeans, a pair of boots, and the underwear. Renee kept only the shorts and wears them sometimes.

At this point in the story of the object, there’s a detour in the intended context. It’s not a big one – the underwear aren’t being used in place of an oven mitt or to organize mail. The underwear are still being worn – although in this case by a woman (itself a small detour in function) – but now, social and emotional factors color and significantly change the context. It’s not simply about whether the briefs are worn, but about how and why they are worn.

What we may be faced with now is not a broad socio-historical survey of undergarments generally (darn!), but an investigation into a new, culturally determined use. Part of the key to this new context might be in the fact that Renee kept the shorts, and not, for instance, the boots. Underwear, because of their closeness to the body and the bodily functions and the socio-sexual part of the body they cover from view, are uniquely intimate objects. At the meeting where I was able to see and touch the briefs, several bystanders became squeamish at the sight of them. I suspect, though, that if they knew the personal story behind the briefs, if they spoke to Renee and discovered a mother’s emotional response to her son’s incarceration, they might be (a little) less uncomfortable with seeing used underwear in a public setting.

I hypothesize that this is not just because of personal connection with Renee and the power of personal stories, but because her use of the underwear is part of a shared history of deep cultural responses to the totemic uses of objects. In seeing Renee’s boxer-briefs as receptacles of emotional response, nostalgia, and comfort, we are now looking at a concept of object-use that supercedes the first intended use of the object, and even supercedes the specifics of Renee’s story. Totemic use is a whole category of object-use with a history all its own.

Kind-of interesting that a pair of underwear can do all of that.

(I went a bit long in this post, but I didn't want to deprive any readers of those tidbits from underwear history. I found a lot of my poppy historical information from Wikipedia and other Web sources, including this video from the BBC. I also consulted a neat source of information on Medieval underwear.)