Underwear. Comfy apple catchers, snaggy thongs or reassuring Y-fronts? In this gallery from Robert E. Jackson’s photograph collection, we see some of the vast range of undies – those designed to be seen and other ‘unmentionables’ Victoria really should keep secret.
“Made you look, made you starre, made you lose hyour underwear”
– British children rhyme
“I like dogs better than men and cats better than dogs and myself best of all, drunk in my underwear looking out the window.”
― Bukowski, Charles
“You shall also make for them linen breeches to cover their nakedness; they shall extend from the hips to the thighs.”
– YHWH to Moses on how Jewish priests should dress in the Promised Land , Exodus 28:42
You stopped us from killing each other
Tom Jones, Tom Jones
You’ll never know but you saved our lives
Tom Jones, Tom Jones
I could never throw my knickers at you
And I don’t come from Wales– The Ballad of Tom Jones, Space
“As a general rule. it’s a comfort issue, literally and metaphorically. And intimacy issue. It’s a big step, putting on foreign underwear. Like betrayal, or emigration.”
― Lee Child, A Wanted Man
“I remembered my mother’s insistence that I always wear clean underwear because I might get knocked down by a car on the way to or from school and I and the family would be disgraced even beyond the grave, presumably, if my underwear was dirty. And I began to worry, in fact, as the doctor sniffed and prodded, about the state of the shorts I was wearing. This made me want to laugh. But I could not breathe.”
― James Baldwin, Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone
“The woman in charge of costuming assigned us our outfits and gave us a lecture on keeping things clean. She held up a calendar and said, “Ladies, you know what this is. Use it. I have scraped enough blood out from the crotches of elf knickers to last me the rest of my life. And don’t tell me, ‘I don’t wear underpants, I’m a dancer.’ You’re not a dancer. If you were a real dancer you wouldn’t be here. You’re an elf and you’re going to wear panties like an elf.”
— David Sedaris, SantaLand Diaries
“Had his brain been constructed of silk, he would have been hard put to it to find sufficient material to make a canary a pair of cami-knickers.”
— P.G. Wodehouse, Mr. Mulliner Speaking
Exod 28:42
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