Undies Through the Ages Trivia Quiz

Answer: 7,000 years

Archaeologists have unearthed leather loincloths dating back to prehistoric times and carbon-dated to 5,000 BCE. We know that Egyptian pharaohs wore linen loin cloths under those skirt-like garments because several examples were found in King Tut's tomb, presumably because the people who packed for his final journey thought he might need some changes of underwear. Loincloths are still worn, quite often as the only garment, in warmer climes - south-east Asia, for instance. The dhoti worn in India is immortalized in Rudyard Kipling's poem 'Gunga Din':
"The uniform 'e wore
Was nothin' much before,
An' rather less than 'arf o' that be'ind,
For a twisty piece of rag
An' a goatskin water-bag
Was all the field-equipment 'e could find."

Answer: Roman female athletes

The men would have been looked on askance if any of them appeared in a strophium, which was a narrow band of soft leather, wool or linen tied around the breasts. Both sexes wore subligacula, either in the form of a loin cloth (men) or what looks like a bikini bottom (women).

There's a mosaic which was uncovered in the Piazza Armerina in Sicily which depicts a woman wearing a strophium and a subligaculum.

Answer: braies

By the Middle Ages, men in western Europe had graduated to loose, trouser-like garments called braies. These were usually made of linen or wool and either had drawstring waists or were tied on with narrow bands of cloth or leather at the waist and also at mid-calf. I assume the mid-calf ties were to keep out the draughts that pervaded those stone castles.

The aristocracy of the period also wore woolen leggings called chausses which covered the legs from ankle to knee,much like modern leg-warmers worn by dancers. Chausses eventually morphed into footed hose.

Answer: False

Historians tend to regard the chastity belt as a myth, although some historians suggest that when hubby rode off to free the Holy Land from the pagans, the missus would confine herself in a chastity belt as protection against would-be rapists.

Answer: They were straight-cut and flattened the bust

Elizabethan corsets must have been very uncomfortable. They were made of wool or linen and stiffened with buckram, reeds, canes, whalebone or other rigid materials. They were originally called bodies (which is where we get our word 'bodice') and came in pairs, one worn over the other. The top 'body' was starched and lavishly embroidered (wool thread for the lower classes, silk for the ladies in the upper echelons of society) and worn over the plain under 'body' with its caning, boning or whatever.

From bodies, women's undergarment fashion moved to stays in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. These garments were laced from behind and only lightly boned. Their intent was to draw the shoulders back to give the women a good posture and to form a high, rounded bosom. In due course, stays changed their name to corsets.

Answer: All of these

At one time, all undergarments were made by hand at home. The upper classes wore silk and fine linen under their clothing, the rest of the populace wore wool or coarse linen, and the very poor wore nothing at all underneath!

In 1794 Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, a machine that made it easier and faster to process cotton bolls prior to weaving. The earlier invention (1764) of the spinning jenny had already made it easier to spin cotton thread on a large scale and the combination of these two inventions brought about mass production of cotton fabric. It didn't take long before merchants of the day found a lucrative source of income in the sale of underpinnings for both men and women, and even the lower classes (who had previously not been able to afford much or nothing at all in the way of underclothing) joined in the unseen fashion parade.

Answer: All of these reasons

We seldom think of Queen Victoria as a fashion icon. However, the frumpy little dowd of later years, with her 66-inch bust and 50-inch waist, was responsible for leading the fashions of the day when she came to the throne at age 18 in 1837 (did you know that it was Victoria who started the fashion of white wedding dresses?). The young Victoria was a mere five feet tall, with an 18 inch waist and women of the day did all they could to emulate her (much as young women in the 1980s and 1990s looked to Princess Diana as a fashion trend-setter).

In order to come as close as they could to that slender waist, women resorted once again to corsets. Victorian corsets pinched in the waist and were laced tightly up the back, which led to some restriction in breathing. It was not unusual for great town and country houses to set aside fainting rooms, so that ladies overcome by the tightness of their corsets could retire to loosen the offending garments for a breathing spell!

Inez Gaches-Saurette, a French corsetiere with a medical degree, argued that tight lacing could lead to damage to a woman's internal organs, and in 1883 her 'health corset' made its debut. It was a straight-fronted corset with inflexible boning and no lacing. Gaches-Sarraute claimed that it supported the wearer's abdominal muscles rather than constricting them.

Answer: One-piece undergarments

Union suits first saw the light of day (or not, since they were undergarments) in Utica, New York and were patented in 1868. The one-piece button-through knit suits were worn by men, women and children of the day. They had full length sleeves and covered the body from the shoulders to the ankles. A buttoned flap over the buttocks - known as the 'access hatch', 'drop seat' or 'fireman's flap' (don't ask me how the firemen got into the act) evidently made trips to the toilet easier (although I don't quite see how!).

Union suits were the precursor to the better-known Long Johns, a two piece outfit consisting of a sleeved undershirt and leggings and possibly named for the American boxer John L. Sullivan who wore such outfits in the ring.

Union suits were worn until at least the 1920s when other underfashions began to supplant them.

Answer: Since 1874

Believe it or not, the jock strap has been around since 1874 when C.F. Bennett of the Chicago-based Sharp and Smith, a sporting goods company, invented it to provide protection, support and comfort for bicycle jockeys bouncing over the cobbled streets of Boston.

In 1897 Bennett formed his own company, Bike Web, and patented and started mass producing the Bike Jockey Strap to the relief of male cyclists everywhere.

Answer: Patented the brassiere

Mary Phelps Jacob was a New York socialite who tied two silk handkerchiefs together and tied them over the upper part of her corset to hide the whalebone poking out of her corset which was visible under her sheer dress. Her friends and family pestered her for similar solutions to their whalebone-poking-through-the-top-of-the-corset problems and Mary was kept busy supplying the demand. Realizing that she was on to a good thing, Mary patented her design in 1914.

While Mary can't claim to be the inventor of the brassiere (women had been wearing brassieres of one kind or another for centuries - qv the Roman strophium), Mary's brassiere design was the first to be mass-marketed and promoted, and the fashion caught on.

Answer: Clark Gable

The movie was 'It Happened One Night' was released in 1934, and popular myth has it that when Clark Gable took off his shirt to reveal (gasp!) his manly naked chest women swooned and men forswore undershirts from that moment on. According to Snopes.com there is absolutely no basis for truth in this legend.

The myth claims a 75% drop in undershirt sales, but there are no figures to indicate such a drop. As Snopes points out, 1934 was the height of the depression and a decline in undershirt sales may just have meant that men could not afford to buy new undershirts because of straitened economic circumstances. Sounds plausible to me.

While movie stars and pop performers can influence a small portion of the population, it seems unlikely that 75% of men in the United States stopped wearing undershirts just because Clark Gable wasn't wearing one in a movie.

Answer: Christian Dior

Christian Dior created the New Look in 1947. After years of wartime austerity, women were thrilled to wear his designs (or their knock-offs - not everyone could afford Dior's haute couture prices). The New Look featured longer skirts, softer shoulders (gone were the hefty padded shoulders of the 1940s, and why anyone ever brought them back again in the 1980s is beynd me), and an altogether more feminine silhouette - except for that unaturally-shaped projectile bustline which one wag referred to as "the B52 bosom". Cone-cupped bras continued to be in fashion well into the early '50s. I can remember riding to school on buses festooned with ads for Gothic spiral-stitched brassieres.

Thankfully, the fashion died out after the mid-fifties (only to be resurrected by Madonna in the 1980s. Come to think of it, the 1980s was one ugly fashion decade!)

Answer: 1930s

Elastic-waisted, buttonless-fly boxer shorts were introduced in the 1930s and were so named because they resembled the shorts worn by boxers in the ring. Boxer shorts underwent an eclipse as the male undergarment of choice in the 1960s and '70s when disco fashions for men included very tight pants, but they started making their comeback in the late 1980s when doctors began warning men that tight-fitting underwear could seriously affect their chances of hearing the word 'dad' on a child's lips.

Answer: Madonna and Cindy Lauper

Oh, Madonna and Cindy, you have a lot to answer for! When these two performers began wearing bras, garter belts and bustiers as outerwear in their stage performances, they heralded the age of the heretofore-unseen being seen everwhere. It is not unusual to see pyjama bottoms worn outdoors (as a fan of 'What Not to Wear' I agree with Clinton and Stacey on that particular fashion trend). Of course, we can blame male rappers for the unfortunately-not-infrequent glimpses of young men's underpants!

Answer: Heidi Klum

Heidi Klum has been one of the VS Angels since 1999 (don't you just despise women who look that great 10 years in a row?) Rebecca served as as an Angel for just one season in 1998, while Tyra Banks did her turn on the squad from 1998 to 2005. Karolina Kurkova joined the Angels in 2000 and is still strutting the runway in luscious lingerie.