Under where: Lingerie sales, fashions go mainstream

Kirk Baird

Wednesday, Feb. 13, 2002 | 8:23 a.m.

David Wittman has a theory about lingerie.

"Back when I had my last girlfriend ... there was a stigma to buying lingerie, that you had an ...," the 31-year-old paused for a moment. "That you had ulterior motives."

"You mean you were trying to get some," his wife, Kelly, 29, corrected.

"Yeah," he said laughing, "but when you're buying (lingerie) for your wife, it's a term of endearment."

In Las Vegas recently for a weekend visit, the Sacramento, Calif., couple were strolling through The Venetian's Grand Canal Shoppes, window shopping, when hosiery at Wolford's caught their attention. The two stopped in and bought a pair of hose.

Normally, Wittman shops for lingerie for his wife on his own, as a birthday present or Valentine's Day gift sometimes just as surprise for her.

"I don't get too wild with it," he said. "I get a little tame."

"Hey," Kelly spoke up. "I might just surprise you. If you like it, I'll wear it. Besides, it's not for me, it's for you."

Whether a symbol of love or lust, Valentine's Day is made for lingerie.

While most intimate-apparel shops won't release sales numbers, Victoria's Secret counts Valentine's Day as its second-biggest shopping day, behind Christmas, said Marnie McLaughlin, director of public relations for the nationwide chain of lingerie stores.

Of course, most of the sales 80-85 percent are made by men. That's compared to 50 percent at Christmas and 15-20 percent during the rest of the year.

"It's the one time of year when men feel motivated to purchase sexy lingerie," McLaughlin said from company headquarters in Columbus, Ohio. "It's expected of them and it's a wonderful thing to do. And, men tend to buy for women what (women) won't buy for themselves."

To meet that demand for Valentine's Day and the rest of the year, national department-store chains have boosted lingerie selections to better match the intimate-apparel specialty shops.

For example, Target Stores has slowly increased its lingerie selection over the years, a company spokeswoman said.

And a year ago, in a companywide effort to boost sales, JC Penney focused on increasing both the selection and quality of the merchandise in its intimate apparel section.

"One thing that was stressed was having merchandise that people wanted and infusing more fashion into the stores, particularly lingerie," said Tim Lyons, spokesman for JC Penney Co. Inc., which is headquartered in Dallas. "That was something we had an opportunity to do and maybe needed updating."

He said the plan has worked thus far, with lingerie sales helping to spur the company's financial turnaround.

While JC Penney doesn't carry some of the "racier" items such as crotchless panties that a Victoria's Secret would have, Lyons said most customers would be "pleasantly surprised" at the range of intimate apparel the stores do feature, such as thong underwear and teddies.

One of the big reasons for the increase of lingerie sales in the United States is a slowly evolving view of the sexy garments as functional and fashionable.

"Americans have become more European in their mentality and approach to lingerie," said Karen Schneider, chief executive officer for Wolford, a worldwide hosiery maker and retailer that got into the lingerie business just three years ago.

"I think that really started in the early '90s," she said. "It's only been the last decade that lingerie has come out of the closet."

Tailor-made taboo

In the early part of the 1900s, there were magazines devoted to intimate apparel and a display of sexy garments was set up for the 1900 World's Fair in Paris.

And when TVs began popping up in American living rooms, lingerie was there, too -- first, in the 1950s with commercials for the Maidenform bras ("I dreamed I was a jet pilot in my Maidenform bra"), and in the '60s with ads for Playtex bras and girdles, featuring women dancing in little more than the advertiser's products.

Even trendy items to the lingerie market, such as the Wonderbra and the thong, aren't really that new. The Wonderbra is simply a variation of the underwire and uplift bras developed in the late '40s/early '50s. Meanwhile the thong has been turning the heads of men in South America, where it originated in the '70s, several years before their North American counterparts.

In fact, no matter what type of lingerie pieces become fashionable in the United States, chances are they are already popular somewhere else -- particularly France, said Dr. Valerie Steele, acting director of the museum of the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York.

"Americans have always had a puritan attitude towards fashion and sexuality," she said. "And since lingerie is a particularly sexy form of fashion, it's been hit with a double-whammy. It's not something the Americans are as comfortable with as the French."

Madonna helped change that belief, however, when her career took off in the mid-'80s, Steele said.

A trend-setter in both music and fashion, the Material Girl began wearing corsets and boostiers as outerwear and helped make intimate apparel fashionable outside the bedroom.

"Madonna was a big part of that," Steele said.

In the '90s the slip dress became popular as a standalone or accessory piece.

Keeping with the cyclical nature of fashion, corsets have become popular again, thanks to last summer's movie-musical "Moulin Rouge." Set in 19th-century France at the notorious Montmartre cabaret club, the film was heavy on sexy costuming.

"It's the single biggest influence on corsets since Madonna," said Steele, who recently wrote a book on the history of the undergarment: "The Corset: A Cultural History" (Yale University Press, $39.95). "It's become so mainstream that (you can buy) corsets off the rack or custom-made for hundreds of dollars."

Power dressing

Schneider said lingerie's popularity is all about taking intimate apparel out of the boudoir and into the boardroom.

She said women are taking more control of their lives and have advanced beyond trying to fit into the corporate world by dressing more masculine, as they did in the '80s.

"In the decades women have become more accepted into the work force," Schneider said. "We've traded our suits in for power bras."

Also, lingerie is a way for women to reward themselves for working hard, as opposed to buying the sexy wear strictly for "entertainment," as was typically the case pre-Women's Liberation Movement in the early '70s, she said.

"It's an affordable luxury, even when times are difficult and women are pulling back," Schneider said. "It's an emotional attachment."

Of course, there is another reason for the enduring and increasing popularity of lingerie: showing off.

"We have a lot of women who exercise and take pride in their figure," she said. "They want to be able to wear things that reflect all the hard work they've done."

Rhonda Lane is diligent about exercising. After trying on a few bodysuits at Wolford, she said one of the rewards for her perseverance is wearing the sexy lingerie.

"Sexy people should be enhanced and sexy things enhance sexy people," the 54-year-old Indiana resident said. "Wearing it just enhances who I feel I am."