To be honest, Warhol’s denouncement wasn’t particularly effective. For many men, watching a woman buying and trying underwear, ruminating over styles, admiring their breasts and bum cheeks in a new pair of pants, is the most incredible turn-on.
You see, for men, women’s underwear is still a bit of a mystery. Even after 10 years of Agent Provocateur — the label that allowed girls to be sexy and stylish in the pant department, that made whorish underwear an aspirational lifestyle choice, that made it okay for men to go shopping for rude things for their girls — we are still pretty clueless. In fact, we only ever see it when we are ogling the pert, airbrushed honeys in GQ, or when the odd bra is discarded on the bathroom floor. Oh, we get glimpses of pant elastic riding high on the hips, peeping over the top of low-slung waistbands, but to men, women’s underwear is just like modern art. We don’t know much about it, but we know what they like. And what we don’t like.
As for me, I really should know better. After all, I have interviewed Elle Macpherson about her underwear and visited Agent Provocateur more times than is perhaps seemly. On one memorable occasion, I travelled to Cannes on a specially chartered Concorde with 40 Victoria’s Secret models; I talked knickers for four days solid with Tyra Banks, Karolina Kurkova and Stephanie Seymour. Even after such an intensive and thoroughly pleasant crash course in foundation-garment semantics, I still couldn’t tell a body from a teddy.
So, while holidaying in an Ibizan villa with a party that included six stylish girls, I decided to have an underwear amnesty. For the purposes of research, I demanded that all the women show me their holiday pants, so that the men in the house could express a preference. What a delightful education it turned out to be.
We had a brace of glittery thongs, an almost edible two-piece in sheer pea-green silk, a pair of dinky boxer shorts, some expensive-looking camiknickers, some dark and lacy numbers, a virtually weightless bit of salmon-coloured satin and some fuchsia-pink cotton jobs. All the girls thought the men would be hot for the thongs. Wrong. Men don’t like thongs. They aren’t sexy. Even a perfectly peachy bottom somehow looks wobbly and ungainly when hoicked up either side with a spaghetti-strap tie.
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In fact, I discovered that the guys were pretty much in agreement over many of the points raised. Men don’t like crimson-red knickers-and-bra sets — too 1970s Ann Summers party, as directed by Mike Leigh. We like a bit of lace, but we are really not into olde-worlde Victorian pants, like the ones they sell in the non-trendy bit of M&S — they remind us of that useless transvestite off Little Britain (“I wear pretty, lacy things because I am a lady”). We’re not into pants that have words like “sexy” embroidered across the bum — it’s for us to decide whether you are sexy or not, dear. And don’t even think about anything fluffy: you might see cute Playmate of the month; we see tragic reader’s wife from Carshalton.
The fact of the matter is, men have dreadful double standards in the foundation-garment department. We don’t mind our pole dancers, our Playboy models and our one-night stands looking seditious and dirty. (Indeed, Robbie Williams loves this kind of women’s underwear so much, he’s planning to have a suit made out of all the choice bras, thongs and knickers that have been hurled at him during his live performances.) When it comes to our long-term partners, however, we want them to look chaste, freshly laundered and clean when they strip down to their smalls.
Most of all, though, we like no underwear at all. Oh, yes: basically, we men are all filthy, low-down, rotten old pervs.