Born in the twenties of the last century, a Japanese girl Kamoi Yoko, quit her job as a journalist at the age of 29 and began selling underwear. "Underwear Awakening" tells the story of her transformation from a journalist to the founder of an underwear brand, spanning more than 20 years.
In the first half of the book, personal history and entrepreneurial history are intertwined, interspersed with memories of Yaju Yangzi's personal life about his parents, friends, and hometown in the process of designing underwear styles, finding office space, and dealing with fabric merchants and distributors. In the second half, the reader is often confronted with lengthy narratives that have nothing to do with underwear, such as a trip to the Mediterranean, or cooking on a cruise ship full of male crew. Such a determined and avant-garde woman can also doubt the cause she loves, and go around aimlessly, in a sense, like the underwear she makes, the efforts we make in life do not necessarily have a clear function, just to comfort ourselves.
An underwear revolution set off by a journalist
In the invitation letter for the first underwear solo exhibition, Kamoju Yangzi wrote a declaration similar to a review report. It sounds unseductive, but it's easy for the reader to extract her attitude. "Societal prejudices have always been that lingerie should only be white and must not be eye-catching, and that sexy and glamorous lingerie is against morality... However, while confronting secular dogma, TUNIC COCO has made new attempts in the field of lingerie production with the themes of 'design with both emotion and function' and 'reasonable tailoring'. ”
If you want to understand the atmosphere of life in that era, you can look back at the Japanese morning drama "Sister in Charge". The family of Tsuneko Kobashi, the founder of the magazine "Life Handbook" played by Gao Dianchongxi, lived in roughly the same era, and the family lost their pillars and lived in difficulties to the point that they had no rice to cook. In a poor material life, superfluous desires are waste and betrayal. It is indeed respectable that non-pragmatism can be ignited in such a situation.
The first piece of underwear that Kamoi made herself was a pair of underpants. Cut off the bottom half of the cotton wool pants and sew jewels on the knees. It was very different from the stumbling, loose and cumbersome underpants of the time. The tight-fitting shirt made her walk as if under her skirt, and she even occasionally showed the glittering ornaments on the shirt during interviews, which surprised the other party and couldn't help but answer questions.
This paragraph seems to be a bit of a suspicion of flirtatiousness, but it still has an exceptional meaning in the era of duck and sheep. Lace, lace, and jewel-encrusted underpants were actually carried forward by the English seamstress Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon at the end of the 19th century. Lucille's signature kung fu is to make her lingerie as beautiful as a chiffon dress, but the starting point is still that women in boring lingerie are unattractive, "I feel so sorry for their husbands." On the other hand, her shirt is not a plaything in the spring boudoir, but a toy to please herself.
The revolution in underwear is often associated with a female awakening of self-awareness. When it comes to the scene about underwear, many people will think of Vivien Leigh telling her maid to desperately tighten her corset in "Gone with the Wind". The use of whale bones and even iron frames to bind the human body to a twisted waist has now become synonymous with the persecution of the male gaze. This may be because, rather than the comfort of the wearer, the mysterious part of the underwear wraps is the protagonist. In 2013, a pair of Queen Victoria's panties appeared at auction, and the focus of public attention was actually on the queen's waistline. Even though the underwear at the time was all drawstring styles, there was no point in discussing the waistline.
Underwear used to be a burden and a shackle for women, and then gradually became an expression of women's self-consciousness. Taking the development of underwear in the United States as an example, as early as 1913, the American Mary Phelps Jacob applied for the original patent for a bra, which consisted of two triangular pieces of fabric and ribbons. But before the 20s of the 20th century, the gender-erasing flat-chested aesthetic was all the rage, and many women wrapped their breasts directly in cloth tape. In the 30s and 50s, the emphasis on "support" began to be emphasized, and bullet corsets that accentuated gender characteristics became popular, and in the 60s, women began to reject traditional tights and wear thin bras that were as light as nothing. In the 70s, with the rise of the feminist movement, girls began to "burn off their bras" again. And the concept of cups, sponge bra pads, prosthetic breasts and other concepts also emerged in the river at the same time.
Today's girls are free to choose from a wide variety of lingerie. If you want to be comfortable, choose cotton underwear without wires, and if you need to be stable, choose a sports bra with good support. If you need to highlight your figure, you can choose gathered underwear with small breasts and big breasts, or full cups with large breasts and small breasts, and of course, you can also wear no underwear. This is the historical result of women's bold expression over the past hundred years.
Zooming in on the timeline to the scale of the entire history of underwear development, what Yaju Yangzi does is not innovation, but awakening. A wide variety of underwear styles have existed for a long time, but they are not chosen. The first batch of underwear she developed was all taken from the styles that were available at the time, regardless of age and function. Charm-bination, inspired by the one-piece in foreign movies, is preceded by a charming charm to highlight the beauty of the female body. A type of leggings called patti-cout, which is a stitching of the patti and patticoat, is similar to the bloomer shorts we wear today. The different preferences for the form of underwear are all women's oscillating pursuit between getting rid of constraints, self-obsession and returning to their original self.
But in the fifties of the last century, Japanese women usually wore only white underwear. Even in the simple white, it also contains the deep complexity of women's hearts. It is not only conservative and pure, but also can be transformed into "the temptation of innocence". In the early days of Yaju Yangzi's business, I met an interesting customer, who was obviously a fashionable young girl in a high-slit tight skirt, but she still picked out a "pure" white panties from a dazzling array of underwear.
It is harder to admit that underwear is chosen purely to please yourself than to admit that you choose underwear to please the opposite sex. When Kamoi Yoko goes to the clothing store run by the female bosses, she is always annoyed by the stubbornness of other women. The female bosses are picky, "yellow is not pleasing, purple represents broken love, and green is like prison clothes", but they obviously wear these colors of clothing. "The only reason they refuse color underwear is that it has never been before. It is not so much the 'karma' of women's underwear development as the 'root and bad Xi' of women themselves. ”
Just for your own clothes
The opportunity for Yaju Yangzi to start making underwear has little to do with gender. "The reason why I switched to selling underwear was not because of the 'fat fan friends' who were keen to dress up and compare their appearance among their female peers. On the contrary, the idea is incubated in the daily interaction with male peers, and the styling is born from the spirit of resistance from the outside to the inside. After the evening newspaper where she worked was acquired, she moved to a large newspaper, only to find that the rebellious journalists in the huge bureaucracy were scattered, and this predicament did not concern men and women, and everyone lacked the courage and consciousness to "cry out when it hurts, and shout when it is needed".
Because he has been a journalist, Yaju Yangzi's narrative often reveals a rational political color, "Being a reporter is like being a reporter." It is necessary to deliver products with authority, independent opinion and leadership to the market. "In a sense, the awakening of the underwear of the duck house goes beyond the category of gender. If you read this book with the expectation of "female consciousness awakening", you may be surprised by her deep friendship with men.
The life model of Yaju Yangzi is his father, who has been a reporter all his life, and when he first entered the society, he crawled in the pile of male reporters, followed them to the izakaya, and learned Xi professional skills and life attitude from them. After the lingerie company got on the right track, there was even an eerie and heartwarming scene in her studio, where ten men gathered around a burqa, discussing whether to put a ribbon on it and where to put it, so that the duck house sheep were full of respect for their "unequivocal objectivity". She quoted a male writer who discussed how men write about women, "Men don't understand women, so they start with not understanding." I don't understand, so I think. Think about it, and then put pen to paper. ”
This spirit of pursuing the ultimate in physical comfort, regardless of gender, has spread throughout the studio. In the process of designing a unisex undershirt, every man who walks into the studio is surrounded by seamstresses, who are dressed in a suit on the upper body and only underwear on the lower body, and his face is flushed as a mannequin. After studying the lower body of countless men, they decided that the opening on the front of the panties was unnecessary, but thoughtfully left an opening on the right side of the panties, which became known as "cecal pants".
Stills from "Underwear White Collar Workers".
In the eyes of researchers of underwear history, both men and women, the neglect and avoidance of underwear are common. Lucy Adlington writes in Stitches of History: Our Clothing Story that there is very little historical evidence for the existence of panties, and that loincloths were almost the only style of men's panties from prehistory to many centuries afterward. Until the 19th century, we couldn't confirm the existence of women's underwear, and it was still unfashionable for Georgian women around the 18th century to wear underwear because it looked too much like men's clothing. "On the one hand, underwear is growing in popularity; On the other hand, some people's taboos and criticism of underwear have never stopped. ”
Luckily, today's lingerie options are so many that it's a headache. Compared with the confrontation with the outside world, the change of underwear is more like an internal push and pull. Changing the style of a bra, bottoms or garter belt is often more related to the attitude towards yourself. As Kamoju Yangzi said in the book, after stripping off the social function, underwear "let me return to me, let you return to you", allowing people to temporarily escape from the sociality of clothing, and intuitively reflect the existence of self-consciousness more than anything outside the body.
When it comes to being bold enough to please yourself and taking care of your life from head to toe, all of us need constant guidance and prompting. Ohashi Town's "Life Notes" has been published since 1946, and the underwear brand of Kamoju Yangzi has survived to this day. After reading this book, I took a special look at the brand website of TUNIC COCO. A lot of brightly colored floral bottoms seem a little outdated now, but that classic polka dot pattern patti-cout is worn on the cold white platform, and it also outlines a fluffy and beautiful buttocks, which makes people's hearts pound.
