Underneath It All
If your thing is seeing scores of beautiful women clad only in underwear, there is no place like Paris in the wintertime.
“This is the mecca,” marveled Patrick Harestad, a masonry contractor from Humboldt County in Northern California.
He should know what he’s talking about. His wife, Katherine, owns and operates a small company in the town of Arcata, 230 miles north of San Francisco, that manufactures “Victorian-inspired sleepwear and lingerie.” This is the second year that the California entrepreneur has left redwood country to exhibit her lacy, silky creations at the French capital’s lingerie show.
For that segment of the rag trade that buys and sells brassieres, panties, nightgowns, tights, bustiers, corsets, girdles, robes, men’s briefs and the rest of what Italians call intimo--intimate wear--the annual Paris Lingerie Salon is the Super Bowl of trade fairs, a colossal display of Lycra and lace, of naughty and nice.
“For people like me, this is the most important show on the planet,” said Katherine Harestad, 42, whose company, White Rose Designs, won an award this year for one of its creations. “Paris is really the wellspring of lingerie. This is where you seek the inspiration and the innovation.”
For four days, two sprawling pavilions of the Parc des Expositions in southwestern Paris were turned into the world’s biggest undies mart. This year, 430 brand names were represented, from Warner’s slinky Marilyn Monroe line to Dutch designer Marlies Dekkers’ aptly named “Undressed” collection of “revolutionary underwear” that includes slit panties and briefs so brief they are called “strings.”
Claiming inspiration from Picasso, filmmakers like John Cassavetes and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and the artillery-shell bras Madonna once wore outside her clothes, the 32-year-old Dekkers said she wants to put underwear to work for “the emancipation of women’s bodies.”
“That looks like it was made from dental floss,” a female employee in The Times Paris bureau said of one typically daring Dekkers creation, a black leather thong that leaves more than 90% of the buttocks exposed.
Entry to the salon is supposed to be restricted to manufacturers, buyers and fashion journalists, and guards this year were posted at the doors to keep out everybody else. That means that under French law, the show is not a public event, so exhibitors like Daniel Perret, in charge of the stand for the Nina Ricci and Millesia brands of lingerie, can hire models as young as 17 to flog their wares.
“Oh, Sonya! You’re going to give people in your office nightmares!” Perret chortled over the microphone as one of the young women he’d engaged paraded in a striking aluminum-hued bra and panties before an appreciative crowd.
Anne Laure, 20, a Nina Ricci model praised by Perret for “the most beautiful cheeks of the show,” said she was working to help pay her way through law school. Did she ever feel self-conscious?
“This is an audience of professionals,” she said. “Of course, you’re going to get voyeurs in all crowds.”
All these little bits of clothing add up to a very big business. According to industry figures, Western European manufacturers each year turn out nearly 100 million bras, more than half a billion pairs of women’s panties, more than 2 billion pairs of women’s tights, nearly 300 million pairs of men’s underwear and 60 million nightgowns.
Though China has become the world’s No. 1 exporter of undergarments, France is the runner-up. The market is a moneymaker for Europe, with $965 million in sales to the United States and other parts of the world in 1996.
Frenchwomen have always been famously interested in underthings; in fact, one of them is remembered here as the creator of the bra. In 1889, Herminie Cadolle cut off the bottom of her corset, the same type of notoriously constraining garment that a rebellious Scarlett O’Hara was laced into in “Gone With the Wind.”
Designing and manufacturing a bra is still something akin to rocket science in the underwear world. At Aubade, a family-owned company that began as a Paris doctor’s corset-making business in 1875, each bra still requires 15 different fabrics, twice that many pieces of material and a score of assembly processes. Each bra takes from 23 to 25 minutes to make, and sells for the equivalent of $46 to $58. The most common sizes are 32C and 34B.
“This is a highly technical product; it’s the reason we are not overrun with cheap imports,” said production chief Anne Pasquier. Like many Europeans, Pasquier is perplexed over what sells in the U.S. market. “It is completely out of sync with us,” she said, as models wearing skimpy, black lace-trimmed nightwear circulated around the Aubade stand. “In America, women buy bras the way they do steaks, down at the supermarket. Basic white, basic model, nothing fancy. But as soon as you jump upward in quality, Americans start thinking of lingerie as something salacious and sleazy.”
In France, the relationship between women and their underwear is much more personal and mysterious. “What a woman doesn’t say on the outside, she says in her lingerie,” salon fashion director Claire Jonathan said. “And women buy lingerie for themselves, not for men.”
Last year, women in France spent more than $2.6 billion on lingerie. For the average Frenchwoman, underwear is 20% of her clothing budget, and she buys a new pair of panties every 2 1/2 months and a bra every 4 1/2 months.
Interestingly, many of France’s best-known lingerie brands have recently been purchased by American apparel conglomerates like Warnaco, Sara Lee and VF Corp. But industry insiders say some of the U.S.-owned lines have plummeted in market share or seem to be floundering.
Organizers claimed this year’s trade show was a great success, with more than 22,000 people attending, including 16,000 buyers. A total of 278 American customers came, 30% more than in 1997.
This year, for the first time, there was a daily fashion parade of men’s briefs, T-shirts and other masculine undergarments along with a separate 40-minute show of women’s wear from assorted producers.
As well as trying to fill order books, designers and manufacturers come to the Paris show and a similar September salon in Lyon to sniff out future trends. A growing emphasis on comfort is one.
“Comfort with elegance, yes, but comfort first of all,” judged Josee Querel, who owns two lingerie stores in the western French city of Nantes and who attended the show with her husband, an optician. (“It’s good for the eyes,” he said.) A lot of her present stock, Querel said, is made up of revealing but not particularly comfortable garments meant to act--in her words--as a “drug” to stimulate blase or overworked business executives and other professionals. “I’m going to have to reevaluate my inventory,” she said.
Jonathan agreed there had been a swing recently away from the once-dominant seductive theme. “Women now say, ‘I don’t care if the lace is the most beautiful in the world. I won’t wear it if it itches,’ ” she said. Materials with a creamy, soft touch, easy-to-wear micro-fibers and “smart” fabrics that massage the legs and fight bacteria that cause perspiration odor are among recent innovations.
Another, more mysterious development is a vogue for dark colors, which some in the industry conjecture may have something to do with a general sense of foreboding as the millennium approaches.
In the United States, Katherine Harestad senses a revolution in lifestyles that could make nonsense out of the very term “underwear.”
“I’ve noticed all of these people getting Internet addresses and working at home on their computers,” said the designer, who is originally from Santa Monica. “When they do, underwear can become outerwear.”
And that, Harestad thinks, will be a growing market niche. In Paris, the California designer was singled out for a creation that can be worn in the bedroom or at the keyboard of a home computer: a jacket in black embroidered see-through lace paired with a camisole and pajama pants in sand-washed navy blue silk charmeuse. It costs $310.
For the next few months, Harestad said, she will contemplate what she’s seen at the Paris show in search of inspiration for yet another lingerie creation. Why such a passion? “Somebody once said that lingerie is a package that you can unwrap,” she said. “It adds mystery to people.” And for the creators, it can be outrageous fun.
“What I love,” Harestad confided, “is going into a business conference with bankers and accountants and all those other kinds of serious people, and saying, ‘You know, when I get depressed, I design G-strings.’ ”
