From Black Venus to Blonde Venus: the meaning of black lingerie

Abstract

The development of the specialized meaning of black lingerie as particularly erotic raises questions regarding the dynamics of race and sexuality, as blackness and black bodies have for several centuries in Western culture been linked to deviant and particularly lascivious sexuality, while whiteness and white bodies have been associated with sexual purity. The article briefly notes the multiple and shifting connotations of black clothing, from nineteenth‐century meanings as signs of both mourning and male sobriety to twentieth‐century meanings as signs of both female sexual sophistication and bohemian opposition. The article then focuses on the bodies, objects, and discourses of blackness and sexuality, from the much discussed ‘apron’ of the Hottentot Venus in the nineteenth century to the cafe au lait performances by white women in American musical revues in the early twentieth century, that suggest that the wearing of black lingerie by white women is a practice of racial masquerade. Black lingerie infuses its wearers with the erotic charge of racialized and therefore transgressive sexuality, but one that is safely contained, like blackface, by its temporary nature and removable ‘skin’. The article ends by discussing the analytic effects of considering both production and consumption in regard to the signification of fashion, as oral histories of retired African American undergarment works report strikingly different meanings of black lingerie constructed on the shop floor from those engendered in the locations and practices of consumer culture. When these workers returned from vacation or sick leave they would find stacks of black undergarments next to their sewing machines left for them by their largely immigrant co‐workers because sewing black thread on black fabric was more difficult. At the shop floor, black lingerie was a sign not of eroticism, but discrimination.