pleasures #2: underwear-as-outerwear or being-seen-as-being-loved
What if your attempts at vulnerability were never misunderstood?
In September, when the weather was still changeable, I wore a white broderie anglaise slip dress out to dinner. This was not unusual for me, but it did end badly.
The dress is long, sleeveless, with a v-neckline, hugging at my hips and waist before it widens to a slight a-line silhouette by the time it hits my thighs and floats all the way down to my calves. I wore it with beaten-up knee-high brown riding boots and an oversized navy argyle sweater. I’d realised the first time I wore the dress that my underwear was just about visible in direct sunlight through the fabric, but this was not so much a design flaw as part of the dress’ charm. I love the freedom and the undoneness of underwear-as-outerwear: the scene in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette when she drifts around a farm in a robe-en-chemise, the briefs-under-tights look at Miu Miu AW23, the silver Liza Bruce ‘naked dress’ Kate Moss wore to a party in 1993, the moment in Picnic At Hanging Rock when the girls take off their stiff dresses and roam the rock in their petticoats and bloomers. By those standards, the dress I wore that day pushed very few boundaries, but as with most things I like to wear, I felt that the spirit of what I wanted to capture hovered over me, imbuing the fabric with what I wanted it to mean.
On the Northern line, I got too hot and took off the sweater. In the distorted dark mirror of the carriage window, my head was neatly guillotined, and I noticed that when I slouched forward, the dress gaped open a little at my cleavage. I sat up straighter and then forgot about it and went back to whatever it is I do on the tube – thinking about love or what I want for dinner or if my bangs look weird. When I got off the tube, the sun was shining and Brat was playing loud through my earphones, and as I walked down the Strand I looked up at the sky — and a man sped up to fall in-step with me, pressing close. His arm brushed against mine for a second before I instinctively started walking faster, composed my face into a blank expression, and steeled myself for whatever he was going to say to me.
I’d intended the outfit to gesture towards an idea of femininity which took on multiple layers and meanings: while getting dressed I’d thought about a Louise Jopling painting, A Modern Cinderella, which I’d seen at an exhibition at the Tate Britain a week before. In the painting, a model is facing away from the viewer, caught in the act of hanging up the pink evening dress she’s been wearing during the painting session. Her white underdress is slipping off one shoulder. In the mirror hanging on the wall, you can see just a glimpse of Jopling’s easel. The model’s state of undress at the time caused a minor scandal.
You can probably imagine what the man said to me. In one swift moment, all my thinking, all my self-fashioning, was undone. I was just a girl in a revealing dress, the material reality of my body no longer something that belonged to me. It doesn’t matter how often I am confronted with a gaze that looks but does not see: it will always feel like a violation.
What happened that day in September is only the crudest example of the difference between being looked at and being seen. This is an essay about slip dresses, but it’s also an essay about love.
Underwear-as-outerwear is a trend, and it will die the usual slow death via Shein knockoffs and The Next Big Thing. But its history is more than Miu Miu’s $600 briefs. In 1783, Marie Antoinette, a woman best remembered for saying something she never said, chose to wear a loose muslin dress in an official court portrait. There was so much uproar (the French already thought that the Austrian queen was a slut and a lesbian) that the painting was removed from the Salon and replaced with another in which she was more appropriately dressed. Attempts by women to present themselves as they see themselves are often misread in this way.
There’s a fashion meme I think about a lot, which goes something like: “wearing a literal shapeless cotton nightgown but in an effortless pinterest cool girl kind of way yk”. The implication of the meme, though, is a different question: how do I prevent being misunderstood? This question haunts all of us all the time, not just when we’re getting ready in the morning. In Conditions of Love: The Philosophy of Intimacy, John Armstrong writes that intimate recognition is a key component of love. “The longing for love,” Armstrong tells us, “is the longing that our sense of isolation will be pierced and that another will enter into the private areas of our existence in a tender and appreciative way.” The philosopher St Augustine thought that all longing was really a longing for love, which is partly why I’m talking about wearing bras-as-tops in the same sentence as the yearning to be seen.
What I like about the underwear-as-outerwear trend is that it suggests there is a realm where your vulnerability will not be misunderstood or taken advantage of. We rarely use the word ‘intimates’ to describe underwear in English, but the high-street Italian lingerie brand, Intimissimi, retains the association. ‘Intimissimi’ translates, literally, to ‘the most intimate things’. This summer, my friend and I walked into the Intimissimi shop on the Rue de Rivoli in Paris. I tried on a sheer silk dress in the safe confines of the changing room. I tried, also, to imagine a place where I could wear it. But then my imagination failed me, and I left the dress behind.
The pleasure of being able to convey exactly what you mean, and to be completely understood, is one you will probably taste just a few times in your life. Fashion, particularly runway fashion, is an exercise in what the world would be like if you could wear whatever you wanted. I could have bought that sheer dress in Paris and worn it in my bedroom, but what I really wanted was to wear it to a party or to drinks with friends, not to attract anyone’s gaze but because I think it would be an interesting thing to wear. I would like to dip in and out of physicality – I would like exposures of my body and mind to be seen as I intend them to be seen.
Sometimes I dress to excite desire, but more often I want to dress to excite other things – creativity, joy, humour, art. If only I could maintain the state of grace, the prelapsarian space, which occurs so rarely in life, when your nudity or partial nudity simply exists – when I’m getting ready to go out with friends, or when I went skinny-dipping with my sister in a frozen river, or even lying in bed post-coital with a lover, each other’s naked bodies no longer a point of excitement but just of co-existence. That’s what I love so much about that Louise Jopling painting: in showing the girl taking off the dress she has been painted in, the model is allowed to literally step out of her role (as a body to be looked at) and into herself (as a person to be seen).
That safe space, where your vulnerability is rewarded with understanding, is not one that is easily accessible, which is entirely by design: how else do you create safety, if not with doors and gates? The realm is pure fantasy: films, paintings, runway shows, red carpet events, fashion parties. And even then, in Picnic At Hanging Rock or The Modern Cinderella or at your best friend’s house party, the fantasy can only be sustained for so long: the schoolgirls disappear, a scandal erupts, Kate Moss is splashed over the tabloids the next morning.
Ten years ago, the FIT in New York hosted an exhibition called Exposed: A History of Lingerie, tracing the development of underwear from the 18th century to the present. The exhibition differentiated between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ lingerie, the latter – crinolines, bustles, structured bras – working to create the contours of the body, the former – slips, panties, unwired bras – to follow the body’s existing contours. Hard or soft, lingerie, like all clothing, is enhancement. When filming Picnic At Hanging Rock, the director Russell Boyd stretched a single, fragile nylon stocking over the camera to create a dreamy, hazey, gentle effect. What he did was to show the world as the girls see it, not what it strictly, materially, looks like.
When we play around with the physicality of the world, of the body, when we find ways to show off our softness – our thoughts, our dreams, our desires, our moods, our oddities, our pleasures – we are putting ourselves in a vulnerable position. But a key component of freedom is the creation of a space where your vulnerability – whatever form it takes – will not be punished, but welcomed. That day in September, I was on my way to meet a friend, and when I arrived at the restaurant, she hugged me and said: “I LOVE this outfit. It’s so you.” And it was just a dress, and it was just another day, and it was just a series of encounters with other people, but when she said that, it felt like I could see myself better, too.
Maybe we will never be free of the misunderstanding gaze, but there will always be pockets of time and space where your tenderness, your openness, is rewarded with understanding.
I love this post so much wow!!!