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Technically speaking, of course, what lies beneath would be anything that is not intended to be seen on the outside. But I’m going to pare it down as much as possible and focus on only two of the many strange things you may be wearing next to your skin. And they are (1) your basic briefs, panties, bloomers, whatever you might like to call them, and (2) the bra.

Given my artificial restriction, the history behind your underwear is probably much shorter than you imagine.Underwear in general, and women’s underwear in particular, is a difficult subject for historians. Very few writers felt the need to describe it for posterity. Pictures don’t help much, and archaeology is mostly helpless, too.

With all those caveats in place, this is the story of women’s underwear.

Underwear Throughout History

In ancient Egypt, there was no such thing, as far as we can tell. Women wore loose linen tunics. Underneath, they were nothing.

In ancient Greece and Rome, there is some debate. There is a famous Sicilian mosaic of the so-called Bikini Girls. It clearly shows women exercising while wearing panties and strapless, tightly bound bras. But the whole point is that they are exercising, and that’s all they are wearing. It’s not underwear; it’s outerwear.

There is zero evidence to show that women wore anything like that as underwear. Most historians think there was nothing under all those flowing, draping dresses.

In ancient China, women did wear undergarments called shayi or dudo, and they were made of beautiful silk with elaborate embroidery. Descendants of those garments are still made and sold today and worn as a halter top or lingerie. But it’s not an ancestor of the underclothes you find in a modern Western department store.

Medieval European women wore a shift or chemise, which was like a shapeless nightgown underneath their dresses. The purpose of the chemise was to keep your dress clean from all your various bodily fluids. The chemise was changed and washed regularly, at least for women who could afford it. The dress was rarely, if ever, washed, because laundry was a big, big deal, and someday I’ll have a series on this podcast of just how much work housework used to be.

Underneath the dress but above the chemise, European women might be wearing any number of petticoats, laces, hoops, baskets, or bum rolls, depending on the exact fashion of the day. But I’m not going to spend much time on those, because I don’t have a hoop skirt or a bum roll in my closet, and you probably don’t either.

Underneath the chemise—nothing.

But wait a minute. I thought, as I was reading all of this, a healthy breeze around the nether regions may be all very well for three weeks of the month, but definitely not okay for the fourth, right?

Well, this is yet another subject where the mostly male writers of historical records just don’t give us all the juicy details. But here are a few things we do know.

First, the tampon is considerably older than you might think, being first mentioned in an Egyptian medical document dating from 1550 BCE. Or you might tie on some rags, wool, papyrus, or moss. Many cultures practiced separation during menstruation. Modern commenters have often viewed this as an example of female oppression. How dare they banish us or call us unclean for something that is simply a fact of life for a healthy woman?

There’s some truth to that. There’s also some truth to the idea that if you’re hanging out in seclusion, or only with other menstruating women, you might genuinely find the physical cleanliness issue easier to manage.

Finally, there was simply the practice of free bleeding, where you just went about your business, bleeding into your chemise and counting upon layers and layers of petticoats and skirts to keep it from showing and occasionally dripping.

Let us not say that nothing has improved for women. I, for one, would prefer a secluded vacation to that.

At the start of the 19th century, dress styles changed. Instead of wearing full, voluminous skirts, a lady of fashion went for Neoclassic drapery, much like a Greek or Roman statue. That drapery was often made of thin muslin or silk, and maybe that was okay for your average Greek or Roman woman living on the Mediterranean, but it was definitely not okay for their Northern European counterparts in wintertime. So, as not to freeze, Northern European women came around to the idea of underwear, and it took various forms, none of which looked like modern briefs.

Drawers or knickers were like loose shorts or even pants, but they didn’t count as wearing pants in our pants episode because they were underwear, not outerwear. Many were simple, plain, and hung straight down from the hips. Others were tied at the knee or at the ankle with a ribbon.

They were not the same as the pantalettes that little girls wore under their dresses, because there was one very critical difference: the ladies’ knickers had an open crotch. You didn’t have to undo or slide anything down to use the loo, because you just positioned yourself over the pit or chamber pot, or what have you, and there you go. That was also what those free women of previous generations in voluminous skirts had done when nature called.

So that seems weird enough, but here’s the part that really boggles the modern mind: The wearing of knickers was already a semi-scandalous thing to do because it was new and involved the most sensitive regions of a woman’s body. Since they brought attention to those regions we prefer not to think about, wearing them was almost more scandalous than not wearing them.

And then came the women who sewed that crotch up.

This was first done by dancers and actresses who were flinging their legs around on stage for a crowd full of gentlemen, with their knickers in full view. They preferred not to put everything on display, so they whipped out their needles and closed the gap.

And because this was first done by women of ill repute, the practice was tainted by association. No self-respecting woman of means, or pretenses to means, would ever do something so racy as to sew it shut. The scandal!

By mid-century, dress styles had changed again. Big skirts were in again, but with an important difference. Instead of being produced by layer upon layer of petticoats, it was produced by an engineering miracle: the steel-sprung hoop skirt.

The hoop skirt created a beautiful bell shape that collapsed when you sat down. It looks like a cage that you carried around with you, a sort of half-hamster ball for women, as it were.

In hot weather, it would have been an improvement over so many layers; in cold weather, there you were, cold again. Being cold is frequently the price of being fashionable, so that may not have overcome the remaining barriers to knickers, but modesty is a different issue altogether. The hoop skirt wasn’t stable. A gust of wind or a quickly passing carriage could send the whole thing flying upwards, revealing everything.

Knickers were now a very good idea.

No less a figure than the prim and proper Queen Victoria herself wore knickers. As early as 1838, a 14-year-old boy managed to infiltrate Buckingham Palace and make off with a pair of the Queen’s underwear stuffed down his trousers.

And that’s not the only time Victoria’s knickers have made headlines. Historical underwear rarely survives into modern times, but at least one of Queen Victoria’s pairs of knickers has. It’s a pair from the 1890s, towards the end of her long life, and in 2015 it sold at auction for £12,000.

Queen Victoria’s knickers look pretty plain and basic to me, but many women had theirs made with frills, lace, or tucks. The legs might be wide and loose or tighter, depending on the dress styles of the time.

Everything was fine until World War One showed up, and women took jobs in factories and needed to wear pants for practicality. And that was the last gasp for open-crotch knickers, because obviously that wasn’t going to work.

And then the war ended, and the Roaring Twenties began. The hemlines came up, and knickers at calf or knee length weren’t going to work either.

What you may not fully appreciate is that even if previous generations of women had wanted to wear something like modern underpants, they couldn’t have. Your standard briefs today are held in place purely by elastic. Knickers never had been. They were tied or buttoned on because elastic wasn’t widely available.

Central and South American Indians had known about rubber for centuries, but Europeans weren’t clued in until the 1700s. Even then, it was of limited usefulness because it only kept its form in a very narrow range of temperatures. Charles Goodyear invented vulcanization in 1839, and his new, stable form of rubber went into clothes from the very beginning. But it was still limited by the supply of natural rubber, and rubber trees certainly didn’t grow in Europe or North America. Elastic in clothes didn’t really become ubiquitous until synthetic rubber became available, which we have thanks to World War One shortages in natural rubber.

So, in the 1930s, we see for the first time something that is recognizable as briefs, and it exists thanks to the combined effect of pants, shorter hemlines, and elastic.

Now, what about higher up?

Bras Throughout History

Traditional history has said that the bra is a modern invention, coming into play sometime in the early 20th century. There’s not as much need for a bra if you were wearing a tightly laced corset. That provided lots of support.

However, archaeology has been filling in some of the gaps in the written record.

In 2008, researchers in Lengberg Castle in Austria lifted some floorboards and discovered an archaeologist’s treasure trove—which means a garbage pile. It seems that the 15th-century remodeling crew had stashed the garbage under the floor rather than hauling it out. The cavity was extremely dry, so we’ve got a rarity: medieval underwear that still exists.

The collection includes several bras which look very modern in design. Rather than the single flattening band we saw in the Sicilian Bikini Girls, these bras have two distinct cups, suggesting that their purpose was to enhance, not to flatten. Incidentally, the underpants in the collection also look somewhat modern, except for the ties. But it is believed that they were worn by the male members of the household.

What does all this tell us?

Well, for one thing, it’s pointless to argue about who first invented pretty much anything, because we’ll always dig up another contender.

And, for another thing, talking in absolutes about huge swaths of people across eras and times is difficult, because while maybe most women didn’t wear bras, clearly at least one 15th-century Austrian woman did. Whatever was going on in Lengberg, historically, it is certainly true that your average woman in the early 20th century had never heard of a bra.

The inventor of the modern bra is a subject of dispute. It is known that the Dutch exotic dancer Mata Hari wore a metal one in 1905, because we have a picture of her wearing it—and very little else.

Another contender for the credit was the American Mary Phelps Jacob, also known as Caresse Crosby, who invented it in 1913 in a last-minute panic before a party when she needed some support but didn’t want the traditional corset cover to show through the sheer part of her dress. She and her maid hastily sewed some handkerchiefs together to make two bags, and voilà: a bra.

After describing it as “delicious to wear,” she danced with abandon. Friends begged for their own. She began sewing and selling them at $1.00 apiece and eventually patented her design.

The Maidenform company was formed in 1929. That sounds like a rough year to start a business, but since they still exist today, they must have weathered the stock market all right.

They invented the cup-sizing system.

Most modern women are literally breathing a sigh of relief that the corset is no longer a required underwear item, but the bra has more in common with it than many of us realize.

For one thing, both the bra and the corset share a goal of idealizing the shape of a woman’s body and cutting down on undesired motion.

Just like the corset, the bra has varied wildly depending on what the ideal shape actually was.

In the ’20s, when the ideal was boyishly thin, bras were intended to compress and flatten. The dudo of China’s Ming and Qing dynasties had the same goal. In the ’50s, the Western ideal was the torpedo bra, that made the breast jut out with a well-defined point. When the ideal is voluptuous, the Wonderbra is popular, since it creates cleavage.

And, like the corset, the idea of tossing it away entirely has been used as a symbol for feminine freedom. Certainly, not everyone thinks that Caresse Crosby’s invention is delicious to wear.

The idea that underwear should not be restricting is quite a recent idea, coming from the hippie movement of the 1960s. Before that, it was a given that your clothes, underwear included, were supposed to be restricting. To quote Tim Gunn, “Even during the Rational Dress Movement of the 19th century, women never sought to completely eliminate restrictions. They just wanted women to be able to wear seven pounds of undergarments rather than the typical fourteen.”

And it hasn’t always been about creating the perfect shape, whatever that is. As more and more women wanted to participate in sports, including the rough ones, it was clear that part of feminine freedom is that not every bra should function like the Wonderbra, even if that is the currently fashionable look. The first sports bras were marketed in the 1970s.

The other underwear-related issue that changed over the 20th century was advertising. Underclothes have been advertised ever since anyone sold them ready-made, but the early ads featured drawings of the items in question—not drawings of the woman wearing the item, certainly not photos of any actual woman wearing them.

The 1950s, which we think of as staunchly conservative, wasn’t conservative about this. The Maidenform company plastered full-color pictures of women in bras all over. So did the movies. So it was only a matter of time before that also seemed far too conservative.

In the 1980s, Madonna made a point of wearing her underwear as outerwear. Various bras and briefs were on full display, some of which were clearly not fulfilling any of the traditional functions for such items. She also indulged in wearing corsets, garters, and other bygone underclothing as outer clothing. Madonna’s flamboyance may not always have fully caught on with a more inhibited public, but she has been credited with starting the trend of underwear as outerwear that still exists today.

Sometimes that trend is for the look of the thing. Sometimes not.

In 1999, Brandi Chastain whipped off her shirt to show her sports bra after winning the World Cup. That had not been done before, and everyone had a theory about her motivations. She brushed aside all the subversive theories, claiming that it had nothing to do with the bra and was just a celebration. Don’t the men whip off their shirts when they win a big game? And now it’s not that unusual to see a woman jogging in a colorful sports bra.

Regardless of whether you approve of this trend, I think we can all agree it’s good not to be wearing fourteen pounds of undergarments.

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Selected Sources:

One of many sources I used for this episode was Amber J. Keyser’s Underneath It All: A History of Women’s Underwear.

The Guardian has an article on Queen Victoria’s knickers. History Extra has an article on the medieval underwear of Lengberg castle. And Fashion Era has a great page on undergarments that goes into much more detail than I did here.

The featured image is the Sicilian Bikini Girls, from Wikipedia.