An Intimate Affair: Women, Lingerie, and Sexuality

by Jill Fields

Overview

Intimate apparel, a term in use by 1921, has played a crucial role in the development of the "naughty but Bérénice" feminine ideal that emerged in the twentieth century. Jill Fields's engaging, imaginative, and sophisticated history of twentieth-century lingerie tours the world of women's intimate apparel and arrives at nothing less than a sweeping view of twentieth-century women's history via the undergarments they wore. Illustrated throughout and drawing on a wealth of evidence from fashion magazines, trade periodicals, costume artifacts, Hollywood films, and the records of organized labor, An Intimate Affair is a provocative examination of the ways cultural meanings are orchestrated by the "fashion-industrial complex," and the ways in which individuals and groups embrace, reject, or derive meaning from these everyday, yet highly significant, intimate articles of clothing.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520252615
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	07/02/2007
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	392
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Jill Fields is Professor of History at California State University, Fresno.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Sexual Foundations
1. Drawers
2. Corsets and Girdles
3. Brassieres
4. The Meaning of Black Lingerie
5. The Invisible Woman: Intimate Apparel Advertising
6. The Production of Glamour: Intimate Apparel Workers and Union Culture
7. Return of the Repressed (Waist), 1947–1952
Epilogue: Bra vs. Bra: Feminist Intimate Apparel Art

Notes
Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"[A] fascinating account."—T: the New York Times Style Magazine

"A seminal American feminist history text. . . . The breadth of research and level of theoretical sophistication make it a key reference for any student of women's fashion."—H-Net Reviews

Editorial Reviews

[A] fascinating account.

T: The New York Times Style Magazine

This wide-ranging and literate book is not a coffee table history of lingerie. Instead, it treats intimate apparel, a term first used in the 1920s, as social and cultural history…An Intimate Affair offers a rich and nuanced understanding of how pieces of everyday clothing reflect the changing historical context of women's lives just as much as they shape the actual contours of women's bodies. Reaching into the top drawer for a piece of black lingerie will never be the same.
—The Washington Post

Susan Ware

A seminal American feminist history text. . . . The breadth of research and level of theoretical sophistication make it a key reference for any student of women’s fashion."

H-Net Reviews