Village Ladies 1

Product Information

A teaser clip released by ITV shows the panel topless for the segment, only concealing their modesty with white dressing robes. Christian Dior's famous 'New Look' required the sort of structured underpinnings that hadn't been seen since The Edwardian Era. The commentary on this video is so incredibly bizarre; it's worth listening to, just very obviously from a different place and time. The short film with a new invention (for 1929), the camiknickers…a precursor to more contemporary teddies, bodysuits, and rompers. Nearly every woman I knew just loved to remove her skirt or dress and show off her bloomers at any excuse, and the photo shows it was harvest time of year.

Slips have more or less fallen out of fashion, but they used to be a vital part of every woman's wardrobe. The French Knicker shape may have tailed off into the ‘50s and ‘60s, but in the 1970s there came a fabulous resurgence of the romantic lace and frills of bygone eras with designers such as Janet Reger introducing a new generation of women to the feminine joys of French Knickers and Camisoles, and our Camiknickers evolved into Teddies. We'll star things off with a catchy tune courtesy of Ernst Lubitsch's 1931 film, The Smiling Lieutenant. She used to say to me that if anyone wants to look at her knickers they are welcome to, and everyone did!During the Second World War, necessity became a big factor in how fashion evolved; material was rationed, the Utility scheme was introduced, and a pair of knickers would have cost you 3 clothing coupons. It's a cultural treasure full of vintage lingerie, vintage burlesque, and some awesome hair and makeup. They are either family photos, ones I have taken or from my lovingly put together collection of rescued photographs, films or postcards. This truly was the Mid-Century wonder fabric, a good example of scientific developments influencing fashion, and exploded into the 1950s in the form of full wide petticoats to go under the “New Look” style dresses (thank you to Christian Dior for introducing the flattering, feminine shape using obscenely generous amounts of fabric to twirl away the deprivation of the war years!

There were silky rayon knickers, stretch-nylon, and many unusual knicker-materials too numerous to list here. Vintage-inspired, authentic vintage, vintage catalogs…taking a past look at women's undergarments is interesting not only from a fashion perspective, but also from a social or cultural one.The "peeping tom" framing device for this video is genuinely pretty creepy/weird, but around the 3:00 minute mark, the fashion part starts.