When Jennifer Wilson set out to, in her words, “investigate the political implications of cleavage,” for a piece in this week’s issue about how conservatives are trying to take sexy back, she didn’t realize how few women know their actual bra size. “That’s incredible to me, given how much space in the cultural imagination boobs occupy,” she told me. In the course of her reporting, she sampled a new size herself at Agent Provocateur, helped by the co-founder of Evie—a magazine that imagines itself “the conservative Cosmo”—who later sent her a lacey balconette push-up. “I didn’t know what to make of the fact,” Wilson writes, “that the only person who had ever gifted me lingerie was the editor of a magazine that had just published an article titled ‘Dear Men, Please Stop Drinking Beer. It’s Making You Effeminate and Infertile.’ ”
Wilson also watched Sydney Sweeney sing Garth Brooks’s “Friends in Low Places” at a pop-up event for her intimates brand SYRN, at Stagecoach (a.k.a. “Trumpchella”), and travelled to Bologna, Italy, to meet the seamstresses of La Perla (known as le perline, or “the little pearls”) who took to the streets to save their jobs. Mostly, she read a lot about lingerie.
Here is Jennifer Wilson’s annotated selection of her favorite books on the subject of undergarments.
“Cold Comfort Farm,” by Stella Gibbons
I watched the movie adaptation of Gibbons’s 1932 comic novel when I was a tween. Rufus Sewell as Seth Starkadder, a sweaty, primitive, insatiable farmhand with a secret intellectual passion for cinema, left a, let’s say, lasting impression. A sendup of “loam and lovechild” rural melodramas, the book follows Flora Poste, in from London to tidy up the messes made by her country relatives’ savage libidos. Her city friends are no saints themselves, though. One collects bras, at the time a newish terrain of underwear; her suitors are fittingly nicknamed “pioneers.”
“The Erotic History of Advertising,” by Tom Reichert
It’s often said that sex sells, but has anyone actually seen an earnings statement? Here, Reichert provides one. The book covers a hundred and fifty years of steamy advertising campaigns for everyday items from coffee (in one ad, from 1876, a woman’s hands are so occupied by her piping hot beverage that her robe starts to slip off) to mouthwash (the phrase “Always the bridesmaid, never the bride” was originally a Listerine ad)—and, of course, underwear. I learned that beefcake-y boxer-brief ads didn’t start with the likes of Marky Mark in his Calvins but with Jockey, which, in 1978, hired the Baltimore Orioles pitcher Jim Palmer to model a pair. “Women buy 70% of men’s underwear,” the company’s C.E.O. told Fortune.
“Selling Sexy: Victoria’s Secret and the Unraveling of an American Icon,” by Lauren Sherman and Chantal Fernandez
It turns out that the only thing more chaotic than Victoria’s Secret’s panty aisle during a ten-for-forty-dollars sale might be the corporation itself. This book is well stocked with juicy intel. My favorite part is the “mini-memoir” of the fictional Victoria that the company’s owner, Les Wexner, had commissioned in the nineties: Victoria Stewart-White gets her business acumen from her father, a “wry but quiet English financier”; her first lingerie shop becomes the “toast of London” after it’s frequented by her friends, as “all her friends are models”; and she marries a barrister and vacations in St. Barth’s, where she sunbathes topless (ironic, given the popularity of the brand’s swimwear).
“In Intimate Detail: How to Choose, Wear, and Love Lingerie,” by Cora Harrington
According to one survey, eighty per cent of women wear the wrong bra size. As I learned, I was among them. Harrington, who for fourteen years ran the popular blog the Lingerie Addict, will teach you in this book how to measure yourself at home, alongside other handy tips. Fingernails always snagging your pantyhose as you put them on? It turns out, there’s such a thing as “hosiery gloves.”
“Bridget Jones’s Diary: Mad About the Boy,” by Helen Fielding
That famous scene from the first movie, of Renée Zellweger deciding between “sexy knickers” and fat-sucking “granny panties” ahead of a romantic rendezvous with her boss (Hugh Grant), isn’t in Fielding’s novel. However, in this later installment, Jones, a widow, is back on the market again. A friend urges her to buy a black slip from La Perla, teasing, “I think, when you were last doing this, they were called ‘petticoats.’ ” These days, “clean girl” underwear brands like Cou Cou Intimates are selling racier versions of the granny panty, rebranded as the “French brief.” I procured a pair at the company’s eco-feminist-themed summer pop-up. Who says women can’t have it all?
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Everybody’s talking about:
- “Switzy,” by Emma Cline. The Booker Prize-nominated novel was released just yesterday, but it’s already the talk of the literati. Our books editor Namara Smith says that “Cline specializes in lonely people on the margins in glamorous but hostile social worlds—in ‘Switzy,’ it’s David, a former executive en route to a euthanasia clinic in Zurich, in a jet borrowed from his ex-boss and not-quite-friend. As the book goes on and David’s defenses are stripped away, Cline builds up an exquisitely detailed portrait of an unfulfilled life.”
- “Fruit Fly,” by Josh Silver. New York magazine’s Book Gossip newsletter posited that this novel, which has now been optioned by A24, was the “sleeper hit of the summer.” It’s about a writer who goes to great, ethically dubious lengths to cure her block.
The staff writer Jill Lepore is loathing:
I miss old-fashioned spam. “Readers keep mentioning the donkey with strong opinions,” read an e-mail I got this morning, at 9:12 A.M., peak e-mail-checking hour. That’s already a red flag, but, then again, the e-mail wasn’t the kind of sus you need to put Pangram on: it was nothing but tells.
Every day and all day long, I, like every other writer or aspiring writer, get some version of this A.I. crap—e-mails purporting to be from readers and book clubs and publicists and authors and publishers and literary agents and podcast hosts, messages that offer the one thing all writers pant for: readers. “What immediately caught my attention,” they’ll begin. Or “What really stood out for me.” A reader! A reader! A reader! a quiet voice says inside. But, no, it’s a machine.
“I’m Sophia Bennett, a book marketer who works with fantasy and romance authors on reader discoverability,” this morning’s correspondence read, mistaking me for the author of a queer medieval swordplay romantasy novel called “Daggermouth” that, I gather, involves a talking jackass. The Jane Austen-coded Ms. Bennett provided me with market analysis, and proposed putting together a “short visibility audit.” But, hey, “no pressure.”
Who says reading is dead? The machines are reading everything, all the time. “What got me wasn’t simply that you wrote about artificial intelligence,” read an e-mail I received last night from “Fanny R. Hafford” (very Richardsonian!), offering to help promote my new book, “The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State.” “It’s that you place AI within a much larger history of power, democracy, and the gradual reshaping of human life.” The book is an extended argument against replacing humans with machines. “The urgency of the argument certainly gives readers plenty to think about,” Fanny wrote. Not to mention the donkey with strong opinions.
Coming soon:
- Kate Atkinson has a new novel coming out tomorrow. “Our Noble Selves,” set in Britain in 1951, is about a war reporter who is implicated in the disappearance of a woman he’s been dating.
- Jodi Picoult’s “Hollow Bones,” about a disaster-obsessed woman whose mother died in the 9/11 attacks, will be released on September 15th.
- Gloria Steinem, the feminist activist who died last week, at the age of ninety-two, has a memoir coming out on the 22nd: “An Unexpected Life.”
P.S. MrBeast has written a book with James Patterson, and—surprise, surprise—there’s a billion-dollar-prize opportunity involved. 💰
