Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

by Susan Faludi

  • • •

  AT THE fashion shows held in summer 1988 for the coming fall season, designers made a few compromises—adding pantsuits and longer skirts to their collections—but these additions often featured a puerile or retaliatory underside. Jean-Paul Gaultier showed pants and blazers—but they were skin-tight Lycra leotards and schoolgirl uniforms. Pierre Cardin produced capelike wraps that fit so tightly even the New York Times fashion page found it “fairly alarming because the models wearing them cannot move their arms.” Romeo Gigli dropped his hemlines but the skirts were so tight the models could only hobble down the runway. One of his models was doubly encumbered; he had tied her up in velvet ropes, straitjacket-style.

  A year later, even the compromises were gone—as designers dressed up their women again in even shorter miniskirts, bone-crushing corsets, push-up cleavage and billows of transparent chiffon. The Lacroix brand of “humor” returned to the runways: models wore costumes modeled after clown suits, “court jester” jackets, molded “breastplates,” and pinstripe suits with one arm and shoulder ripped to shreds. By 1990, Valentino was pushing “baby dolls,” Gianni Versace was featuring “skirts that barely clear the buttocks,” and the Lacroix collection was offering jumpsuits with “gold-encrusted” corsets.

  If the apparel makers could not get women to wear poufs, they would try dictating another humbling mode of fashion. The point was not so much the content of the style as its enforcement. There was a reason why their designs continued to regress into female infantilism, even in the face of a flood of market reports on aging female consumers: minimizing the female form might be one way for designers to maximize their own authority over it. The woman who walks in tiny steps clutching a teddy bear—as so many did on the late ’80s runways—is a child who follows instructions. The woman who steps down the aisle to George Michael’s “Father Figure”—the most popular runway song in 1988—is a daughter who minds her elders. Modern American women “won’t do as they are told anymore,” the couturier had complained to Molloy. But just maybe they would—if only they could be persuaded to think of themselves as daddy’s little girls.

  FEMININITY, UNDERCOVER

  “Some enchanted evening, you will see a stranger. . . .” The music came up at the MK Club in New York, and the buyers and fashion writers, who had been downing drinks from the open bar for more than an hour, quieted as rose-colored lights drenched the stage. Six models in satin panties and lace teddies drifted dreamily into view and took turns swooning on the main stage prop—a Victorian couch. The enervated ladies—“Sophia,” “Desiree,” “Amapola”—languorously stroked their tresses with antique silver hairbrushes, stopping occasionally to lift limp hands to their brows, as if even this bit of grooming overtaxed their delicate constitutions.

  The press release described the event as Bob Mackie’s “premiere collection” of fantasy lingerie. In fact, the Hollywood costume designer (author of Dressing for Glamour) had introduced a nearly identical line ten years before. It failed then in a matter of weeks—but the women of the late ’80s, Mackie believed, were different. “I see it changing,” Mackie asserts. “Women want to wear very feminine lingerie now.”

  Mackie got this impression not from women but from the late-’80s lingerie industry, which claimed to be in the midst of an “Intimate Apparel Explosion.” As usual, this was a marketing slogan, not a social trend. Frustrated by slackening sales, the Intimate Apparel Council—an all-male board of lingerie makers—established a special public relations committee in 1987. Its mission: Stir up “excitement.”

  The committee immediately issued a press release proclaiming that “cleavage is back” and that the average woman’s bust had suddenly swelled from 34B to 36C. “Bustiers, corsets, camisoles, knickers, and petticoats,” the press kits declared, are now not only “accepted” by women but actually represent “a fashion statement.” A $10,000 focus-group study gathered information for the committee about the preferences of manufacturers and retail buyers. No female consumers were surveyed. “It’s not that we aren’t interested in them,” Karen Bromley, the committee’s spokesperson, explains. “There’s just limited dollars.”

  In anticipation of the Intimate Apparel Explosion, manufacturers boosted the production of undergarments to its highest level in a dozen years. In 1987, the same year the fashion industry slashed its output of women’s suits, it doubled production of garter belts. Again, it was the “better-business” shopper that the fashion marketers were after; in one year, the industry nearly tripled its shipments of luxury lingerie. Du Pont, the largest maker of foundation fabrics, simultaneously began a nationwide “education program,” which included “training videos” in stores, fitting room posters and special “training” tags on the clothes to teach women the virtues of underwire bras and girdles (or “body shapers,” as they now called them—garments that allow women “a sense of control”). Once again, a fashion regression was billed as a feminist breakthrough. “Women have come a long way since the 1960s,” Du Pont’s sales literature exulted. “They now care about what they wear under clothes.”

  The fashion press, as usual, was accommodating. “Bra sales are booming,” the New York Daily News claimed. Its evidence: the Intimate Apparel Council’s press release. Enlisting one fake backlash trend to promote another, the New York Times claimed that women were rushing out to buy $375 bustiers to use “for cocooning.” Life dedicated its June 1989 cover to a hundredth-anniversary salute, “Hurrah for the Bra,” and insisted, likewise without data, that women were eagerly investing in designer brassieres and corsets. In an interview later, the article’s author, Claudia Dowling, admits that she herself doesn’t fit the trend; when asked, she can’t even recall what brand bra she wears: “Your basic Warner whatever, I guess,” she says.

  Hollywood also hastened to the aid of the intimate-apparel industry, with garter belts in Bull Durham, push-up bras in Dangerous Liaisons, and merry-widow regalia galore in Working Girl. TV did its bit, too, as characters from The Young and the Restless to Dynasty jumped into bustiers, and even the women of thirtysomething inspected teddies in one shopping episode.

  The fashion press marketed the Intimate Apparel Explosion as a symbol of modern women’s new sexual freedom. “The ‘Sexy’ Revolution Ignites Intimate Apparel,” Body Fashions announced in its October 1987 cover story. But the magazine was right to put quotes around “sexy.” The cover model was encased in a full-body girdle, and the lingerie inside was mostly of Victorian vintage. Late-’80s lingerie celebrated the repression, not the flowering, of female sexuality. The ideal Victorian lady it had originally been designed for, after all, wasn’t supposed to have any libido.

  A few years before the Intimate Apparel Explosion, the pop singer Madonna gained notoriety by wearing a black bustier as a shirt. In her rebellious send-up of prim notions of feminine propriety, she paraded her sexuality and transformed “intimate apparel” into an explicit ironic statement. This was not, however, the sort of “sexy revolution” that the fashion designers had in mind. “That Madonna look was vulgar,” Bob Mackie sniffs. “It was overly sexually expressive. The slits and the clothes cut up and pulled all around; you couldn’t tell the sluts from the schoolgirls.” The lingerie that he advocated had “a more ladylike feminine attitude.”

  Late Victorian apparel merchants were the first to mass-market “feminine” lingerie, turning corsets into a “tight-lacing” fetish and weighing women down in thirty pounds of bustles and petticoats. It worked for them; by the turn of the century, they had ushered in “the great epoch of underwear.” Lingerie publicists of the ’80s offered various sociological reasons for the Victorian underwear revival, from “the return of marriage” to “fear of AIDS”—though they never did explain how garter belts ward off infection. But the real reason for the Victorian renaissance was strictly business. “Whenever the romantic Victorian mood is in, we are going to do better,” explains Peter Velardi, chairman of the lingerie giant Vanity Fair and a member of the Int
imate Apparel Council’s executive committee.

  In this decade’s underwear campaign, the intimate-apparel industry owed its heaviest promotional debt to the Limited, the fashion retailer that turned a California lingerie boutique named Victoria’s Secret into a national chain with 346 shops in five years. “I don’t want to sound arrogant,” Howard Gross, president of Victoria’s Secret, says, “but . . . we caused the Intimate Apparel Explosion. We started it and a lot of people wanted to copy it.”

  The designers of the Victoria’s Secret shop, a Disneyland version of a 19th-century lady’s dressing room, packed each outlet with “antique” armoires and sepia photos of brides and mothers. Their blueprint was quickly copied by other retailers: May’s “Amanda’s Closet,” Marshall Field’s “Amelia’s Boutique,” Belk’s “Marianne’s Boutique,” and Bullock’s “Le Boudoir.” Even Frederick’s of Hollywood reverted to Victoriana, replacing fright wigs with lace chemises, repainting its walls in ladylike pinks and mauves and banning frontal nudity from its catalogs. “You can put our catalog on your coffee table now,” George Townson, president of Frederick’s, says proudly.

  The Limited bought Victoria’s Secret in 1982 from its originator, Roy Raymond, who opened the first shop in a suburban mall in Palo Alto, California. A Stanford MBA and former marketing man for the Vicks company—where he developed such unsuccessful hygiene products as a post-defecation foam to dab on toilet paper—Raymond wanted to create a store that would cater to his gender. “Part of the game was to make it more comfortable to men,” he says. “I aimed it, I guess, at myself.” But Raymond didn’t want his female customers to think a man was running the store; that might put them off. So he was careful to include in the store’s catalogs a personal letter to subscribers from “Victoria,” the store’s putative owner, who revealed her personal preferences in lingerie and urged readers to visit “my boutique.” If customers called to inquire after Ms. Victoria’s whereabouts, the salesclerks were instructed to say she was “traveling in Europe.” As for the media, Raymond’s wife handled all TV appearances.

  Raymond settled on a Victorian theme both because he was renovating his own Victorian home in San Francisco at the time and because it seemed like “a romantic happy time.” He explains: “It’s that Ralph Lauren image . . . that people were happier then. I don’t know if that is really true. It’s just the image in my mind, I guess created by all the media things I’ve seen. But it’s real.”

  Maybe the Victorian era wasn’t the best of times for the female population, he acknowledges, but he came up with a marketing strategy to deal with that problem: women are now “liberated” enough to choose corsets to please themselves, not their men. “We had this whole pitch,” he recalls, “that the woman bought this very romantic and sexy lingerie to feel good about herself, and the effect it had on a man was secondary. It allowed us to sell these garments without seeming sexist.” But was it true? He shrugs. “It was just the philosophy we used. The media picked it up and called it a ‘trend,’ but I don’t know. I’ve never seen any statistics.”

  When the Limited took over Victoria’s Secret, the new chief continued the theme. Career women want to wear bustiers in the boardroom, Howard Gross says, so they can feel confident that, underneath it all, they are still anatomically correct. “Women get a little pip, a little perk out of it,” he explains. “It’s like, ‘Here I am at this very serious business meeting and they really don’t know that I’m wearing a garter belt!’” Gross didn’t have any statistics to support this theory, either: “The company does no consumer or market research, absolutely none! I just don’t believe in it.” Instead of asking everyday women what they wanted in underwear, Gross conducted in-house brainstorming sessions where top company managers sat around a table and revealed their “romantic fantasies.” Some of them, Gross admits, were actually “not so romantic”—like the male executive who imagined, “I’m in bed with eighteen women.”

  • • •

  ON A late afternoon in the summer of 1988, row after row of silk teddies hang, untouched, at the original Victoria’s Secret shop in Palo Alto’s Stanford Shopping Center. The shelves are stuffed with floral-scented teddy bears in tiny wedding gowns. At $18 to $34 each, these cuddly brides aren’t exactly big sellers; dust has collected on their veils. But over at the bargains table, where basic cotton underwear is on sale, “four for $16,” it looks like a cyclone has touched down.

  “Oh God, the panty table is a mess,” groans head “proprietress” Becky Johnson. As she straightens up for what she says must be the tenth time that day, two women walk in the door and charge the bargain panty table. “The prices on these panties are wonderful,” Bonnie Pearlman says, holding up a basic brief to her friend. “But will they shrink?” she wonders, pulling the elastic back and forth. Asked if they are here for the Victorian lingerie, they both shake their heads. Pearl-man says, “I look for what fits well.” Suzanne Ellis, another customer, surveys the racks of gossamer teddies and rolls her eyes. “I’ve had a few of these things given to me,” she says. “It was like, ‘Uh, gee, thanks.’ I mean, I really don’t need to sit on snaps all day.” She holds up her purchase for the day: the four-for-$16 cotton panties. Even proprietress Becky Johnson says she buys “good ol’ basic bras and panties” here. So who’s buying the frilly Victorian stuff? Johnson: “Men.”

  While men represent 30 to 40 percent of the shoppers at Victoria’s Secret stores, they account for nearly half the dollar volume, company managers estimate. “Men are great,” sighs one of the salesclerks at the Stanford store. “They’ll spend anything.”

  One such specimen wanders into the shop just then. Jim Draeger, a thirty-five-year-old attorney, bypasses the basic panty table and heads directly for the bustier racks. “I’ve been coming here since 1980,” he says, scrutinizing a silky bodice. “This type of clothes enhances a woman’s sexuality. The laciness of it, the peek-a-boo quality of it. My only regret is that a lot of the stuff you see in the catalog you can’t buy in the store.” He settles on a tastefully dainty G-string.

  • • •

  THE INTIMATE Apparel Explosion of 1987 never happened. That year, women’s annual purchases of teddies actually fell 31 percent. Women bought 40 million fewer panties than a year earlier, and 9 million fewer bras. Sales of all chemises, slips, and teddies fell $4 million in two years.

  “Part of the professionalism of women may be that underwear is becoming to them like jockey shorts for guys,” says John Tugman, vice president and general manager of soft goods for MRCA, which tracks consumption patterns in 11,500 households. “It’s becoming more and more of a functional item, not a sex item. Practical comfort is what they care about.”

  If lingerie makers had leapt on this real trend, they might have made some real money. This business strategy occurred to one company, Jockey International, the nation’s oldest manufacturer of premium men’s underwear. In 1982, Jockey’s new president stood up at a high-level marketing meeting and made a modest proposal: what if the company started selling women’s underwear, with the same comfort and quality as the men’s? After all, he pointed out, for years the company had received reams of letters from women asking them to do just that.

  As Jockey president Howard Cooley recalls, grizzled company veterans responded with horror; he would turn Jockey into “a woman’s company,” they sputtered. Executives in the company’s ad agency were equally aghast: “You are going to destroy your masculine image,” one of them told Cooley. And when the Jockey president ran his proposal by retailers, every single one opposed it. Women won’t buy underwear without lace, they told him, and they certainly won’t buy panties with the “male” Jockey label on the waistband.

  Cooley decided to try it anyway. In preparation, the company’s market research department took another novel step—it actually solicited women’s advice. Jockey’s researchers invited scores of women to try on hundreds of panties and say which they liked the best. The results: women want underwear that won’t ride u
p, won’t fall apart in the wash, and actually is the size promised on the label.

  In 1983, the company introduced “Jockey for Her”—with an advertising campaign featuring real women who actually wore and liked the underwear, women from a range of professions, ages, and body types. They included a grandmother, an airline pilot, and a beautician who was even a little stocky. The brand became an instant success; within five years, it was the most popular brand of women’s underwear in the nation, with an extraordinary 40 percent share of the market.

  Jockey for Her inspired imitations from several large men’s underwear manufacturers. But by and large, the women’s intimate-apparel companies ignored the company’s success, and headed even further in the opposite direction. Instead of comfortable briefs that don’t ride up, the industry introduced this practical new undergarment—G-string—style “thongs.” And on the rare occasion when women did get a chance to talk to lingerie makers, the companies simply disregarded their comments. Maidenform’s ad agency, Levine Huntley Schmidt & Beaver, spent months interviewing focus groups of women about lingerie. “The women complained that no one understood their needs,” creative director Jay Taub says. “They wanted to be treated like real people.” But in the new Maidenform ad campaign that resulted, the only “real people” featured were male celebrities and the only “needs” the men addressed were their own. As Omar Sharif explained in one typical ad, he liked lingerie because it “tells me how she feels about me.”

  GUESS AND THE YEAR OF THE REAR

  For the most part, fashion makers’ efforts to regain control of the independent female consumer were veiled, tucked behind a flattering and hushed awe for that newly feminine lady of fashion. But this adoration was reserved for women who played by the backlash’s rules, accepting casting as meek girls or virtuous Victorian ladies. For less malleable women, another fashion message began to surface—featuring the threat of discipline.