Unmentionables

Unmentionables traces the history of underwear from its earliest appearance around the frozen loins of a 5,30O-year-old Tyrolean iceman to its up-to-the-minute status as fashion's new outerwear. Using fine art, photography, film stills, cartoons, and advertisements to tell the story visually, Elaine Benson also goes on to describe the social history and psychological underpinnings of a subject that holds an incomparably powerful fascination for all of us. Tying the images and text together is the extraordinary design of John Esten, who manages to show the subject's unexpected connections and the contradictions between past and present, fantasy and real life. Here is a 1928 photo of a corseted Mae West juxtaposed with a 1990 photo of Madonna in her Jean Paul Gaultier cone-shaped cups. From a 1526 painting of Adam and Eve, to a 1958 Alfred Eisenstaedt photo of Elvis Presley weighing in for the army, to a 1995 Herb Ritts photo for a Hugo Boss European advertising campaign, Unmentionables is the first book devoted to this playful, illuminating, and inevitably stimulating subject, whose appeal is gender-free and universal.