For Whom the Bell Tolls

We need to talk about underpants dressing. Yes, we do.

What the hell are we going to do about underpants dressing? At first it was easy to ignore—of course Kendall Jenner might appear wearing nothing but a shirt and panties and heels, but I needn’t worry; this is not for me! But then the image is repeated again and again. Your eye adjusts. What looked absurd initially starts to look intriguing and then charming and finally you find yourself, involuntarily, wondering if you just … might … dare. This isn’t a matter of wanting to be trendy. It’s a matter of a visual readjustment, moving us gradually from shock to tolerance to acceptance to desire, the slippery slope of being attuned to the world.

Many years ago, my editor at The New Yorker mentioned that he had never been to a fashion show, so I told him I would take him to one during New York Fashion Week. I got us tickets to see Tracy Feith—I think it was Tracy Feith—whose show was being staged at a Times Square strip club. When we arrived, a full battalion of strippers was idly performing pole dances. This was probably not what my editor had in mind. Anyway, the thing that stands out most in my memory was that Feith showed a lot of very extreme bell bottoms that were skin-tight to the knee and then flared out like little circus tents from there on down. This was in, say, 1993 or so, and no one had worn bell bottoms since maybe 1973. Pants were skinny. These bell bottoms looked spectacularly silly, outlandish, impossible. We giggled.