POLAND — Face it, underwear is fascinating! So much attention spent on a garment so few people are supposed to ever see. No wonder the Museum of Industry in Opatowek, Poland is brightening up winter with a retrospective on women’s under garments. Whether it’s modest knickers, scary skinny corsets, or barely there bikini style bottoms, the progress of ladies unmentionables is on display during the “From Pantaloons to G-Strings” exhibit for the good people of Opatowek and surrounding areas to ponder and admire.
Ewa Sieranska, curator at the Central Textile Museum in Lodz, which loaned 140 items to the museum, acknowledges that the exhibit is daring. “Undergarments were pretty much kept well out of sight in the old days,” she observed to the Associated Press. “At the beginning of the 20th century, you couldn’t show them at all, and later, only a little bit, whereas now they’re everywhere.”
Part of what attendees of the exhibit will learn is how women’s undergarments changed not merely with the times but with the social trends. For instance, as women entered the workplace after the turn of the 20th century, their hidden delicates became less bulky and included garter belts designed to suspend stockings. The Museum of Industry exhibit includes a white garter belt with pink hearts and clasps by way of example. Such garments are a far cry from the “tygodniowki” package of seven plain cotton panties commonly available to Polish women under the country’s previously Communist regime.
According to museum curator Ewa Klysz, “When people came to see the exhibit when it first opened, it caused a range of different reactions. But these items are subject to historical research and this is a serious exhibit.” Among the reactions were older visitors who sometimes remember what it was like to wear what is now on exhibit. “Sometimes they say, ‘Oh, I used to wear that,’ or ‘Ugh, those were horribly uncomfortable.”
Although the majority of items being displayed were designed for women, a few men’s garments are also available for viewing, including boxer shorts, robes, and a 1930s-era jock strap. One of the major reasons for the lack of representation on the male side of the undergarment spectrum is it’s relative lack of innovation. Whereas women’s unmentionables have evolved considerably over the years, men’s have stayed much the same.
As for what may be on the underwear horizon, Klysz isn’t willing to venture a guess, although she does propose that it might be “the return to what we wore before underwear – nothing.”
“From Pantaloons to G-Strings” will run through the end of March.
