Classy Lingerie

Abstract

Underwear is the most intimate form of dress, and the type of underwear known as ‘lingerie’ is particularly invested with meanings of femininity, sexuality and pleasure. This article focuses on mass-market lingerie and is based on an ethnographic study of Ann Summers home shopping parties at which lingerie, sex toys and other ‘personal’ products are sold to women in the UK. The analysis draws on the work of Bourdieu and Skeggs to argue that the apparently ‘private’ world of lingerie is simultaneously part of the ‘public’ world of class distinction. The class connotations of mass-market lingerie are not simply aspirational, but are also used by working- and lower-middle-class women to distinguish themselves from ‘posh’ women who are thereby defined as pretentious, boring, snobbish or tasteless. The article concludes that the processes of choosing and buying lingerie involve identifications and dis-identifications of class, gender and sexuality, even though the garments themselves are rarely if ever worn in public.