Racy, Not Lacy

Valentine’s Day has me thinking about love and lace. Love, because now is the time to declare it. And lace, because according to one magazine's “Fashion Girls” (what?), it should be a part of my love-declaring outfit.

It’s hard to miss the pattern: articles that give advice on what to wear for Valentine’s Day say that lace—on a dress, in a coat, as a skirt, or randomly in the middle of your legs—is the way to look irresistible. And I’m just sitting here in Dunster House’s dining hall wondering why.

The thing is, I think that each passing generation finds lace less and less sexy. I don’t mean to play dumb. I know, I know. Underwear is made of lace, and underwear is sexy. The Victoria’s Secret fashion show didn’t draw 6.7 million live viewers last year because the models wore confusingly large angel wings. It’s because there’s a lot of lace and not much else. Sex sells.

But, in my defense, the Victoria’s Secret fashion show has been losing viewers each year since 2012, and one of the hottest trends of 2016 was those Calvin Klein “logo” underwear that look like men’s briefs. No lace in sight.

Kylie Jenner’s Instagram is like a love-letter to the "logo" underwear—she regularly posts photos of herself in Calvin Kleins or similar briefs. In the most popular of these photos, which garnered over 3 million likes, she and her boyfriend seem to reenact a legendary Calvin Klein ad featuring Mark Wahlberg and Kate Moss. In 1992, when the original ad ran, the image of two mega-hot superstars—one a buff dude, the other a waifish supermodel—lounging in identical Calvin Klein underwear grew sales exponentially. Unisex underwear was undeniably in. Sporty was sexy. Cotton was cool.

Brilliant though she may be, Kylie didn’t spontaneously bring back the Comfortable Unisex Underwear trend. Back in spring 2015, Calvin Klein itself ran an ad campaign that looked unmistakably like the Wahlberg/Moss one. The new photos featured of-the-moment superstars Justin Bieber and Lara Stone, but the effect is identical: A woman and a man are wearing the same underwear, and both of them look sultry.

Briefs are clearly back. This is useful information if you care about being on trend. But more importantly, it might be evidence that we, collectively as Americans, are tired of the lacy, formal, gussied-up definition of what it means to be “sexy” or “appealing” or “attractive.” We’re making it a little more comfortable, or at least a little less delicate. If lace could talk, we’re re-writing what it would say.

This has already happened at least once. Before people wore lace to look sexy, they wore it to look rich. The first samples of lace were hand-woven in Italy the 1400s, centuries before machines existed. Women who wove lace often went blind from the detail-oriented work. It could take two hours to make just one inch of the stuff.

Needless to say, lace was insanely expensive. Only the wealthiest nobles could afford it, and even they sometimes spent their entire fortunes on lace collars and cuffs in order to look rich. By the 1700s, nobles bought lace like today’s one-percent buy vintage sports cars.

Then, suddenly, it all stopped. When the French Revolution broke out in 1789, it became incredibly uncool to buy and own luxury goods like lace. By the 1800s, with the Industrial Revolution in full swing, machine-made lace hit the markets and rendered the handmade stuff less valuable. Over time, it became easy and cheap to produce lace that was lightweight, breathable, and easy to wash—perfect for making underwear. The rest is history.

Which brings me to the present: I see Americans rethinking the meaning of lace once more. If Kylie Jenner fell right into Calvin Klein’s marketing trap, she’s just one of many gullible consumers to jump on the boy-briefs bandwagon. At Bloomingdale's, the underwear are a top seller. Urban Outfitters now carries Calvin Klein in their stores, American Apparel made their own version, and even high-fashion designer Moschino copied the look and sells it for six times the price.

Instead of creating barely-there, pin-up worthy lingerie, designers like those behind the brand Zimmermann are now layering lace on top of itself to create very voluminous dresses that are anything but revealing. They take elements from underwear design—which would classically be visible only in private—and make them totally obvious so that they’re less sexualized. There’s criss-crossed ribbon that laces up like a corset, but it’s on the outside of the dress, obscuring rather than accentuating its wearer’s chest. It’s just sheer enough to remind us of what we can’t see. All we get for free is this woman’s wrist. If the Victoria’s Secret outfits say “come hither,” Zimmermann’s dress says “I dressed up as a rugged Disney princess today because I wanted to.”

The lacy Zimmermann dress and not-at-all lacy Calvin Klein underwear are two interpretations of the same definition of attractiveness—one that recognizes that benign details are the most intimate. One that wants us to dress for ourselves. If you feel most confident in a dress that kind of looks like a tablecloth, then you’ll look stunning in it.

And by the same token, you don’t need feathers and sparkles and glitter on your underwear to be appealing. Calvin Klein cotton would be much more comfortable under your Zimmermann dress anyway.

Lily K. Calcagnini ’18, a former Crimson editorial executive, is a History & Literature concentrator living in Dunster House. Her column appears on alternate Mondays.