Muriel Barbier is a talented postgraduate student at the Ecole du Louvre where she now teaches 17th to 19th century decorative arts. She is also a lecturer at the Fashion and Textile Museum and other UCAD museums and Curating Assistant at the Galliera Museum.

Shazia Boucher is Curator at the Musee de la Dentelle in Calais, and often contributes to exhibitions on fashion, lingerie, and lace.

What do the thousands of images of bras and panties on perfectly sculpted bodies that we see spread across billboards and magazines say about our society? Many women indulge in lingerie to please men. Yet, since Antiquily,women have always kept lingerie hidden away under outer garments. Thus,lingerie must be more than erotic bait. Authors Muriel Barbier and Shazla Boucher have researched iconography to explore the relationship of lingerle to society, the economy and the corridors of intimacy. They correlate lingerle with emancipation, querying whether it asserts newfound freedoms or simply adjusts to conform to changing social values. The result is a rigorous scientific rationale spiced with a zestly humour. And the tinier lingerie gets, the more scholarly attention the authors believe it deserves.

Preface by Chantal Thomass

Introduction

Underwear and fashion

Lingerie, corsettT and hosiery

How underwear began to allow the silhouette evolve

From Ancient Greece to modern woman: what have the); been wearing under their clothes?

Materials"

Colours

Underwear and Society

Stages of life

Caring for linen

A woman's private life and clothing

ContradictotT arguments about trousers for women and the corset

Sports underwear

Eroticism, seduction and fetishism

The eroticism of women Zs' underwear

Seductive and sexy underwear

Fetishism and women underwear; JJvm private clubs to the catwalk

Economics

 Lingerie manufacturing

 The current lingerie market

 Underwear on top

Conclusion

 Glossary

 Technical and general terms

 Terms specific to underwear

 Notes

 Bibliography

 Acknowledgements