Time.news – Underwear? In fashion it is no longer a taboo. Now he performs, naturally. From bra to panties. “Even socks enjoy an unusual popularity as an accessory”, writes Paìs in its pages dedicated to fashion trends.
But there’s one garment that perfectly exemplifies the visible lingerie trend and it’s ‘the thong’, always front and center outside hipster pants or when adorning the open back of sexiest dresses. Emblem of 2000s fashion, its success, writes the Spanish newspaper, is due “to the glorification of the ‘B side'”. Paradoxically, “the censorship inhibits the nipple but places no limits on this part of the body”, the key to the new standard of beauty popularized by icons such as the ubiquitous Kim Kardashian.
But to reconstruct the true origin of the thong, we need to go back more than two decades, because “its contemporary origin is the seventies”, explains Ana Velasco Molpeceres, author of the book “History of fashion in Spain: from shawl to bikini”. But while there is no agreement on the exact origin of the thong, the original designs – raw, worn by men and outside the underwear category as worn with nothing on – were used in different parts of South America, Africa and Asia, to the point that “everything originates in the mid-17th century”, as archival research testifies.
The newspaper reconstructs: “The couple formed by Yáñez Iglesias and Yolanda Luccara were traveling on a sailboat when it was shipwrecked on the Chilean island of Santa d’Or. The local women wore a kind of loincloth made of shells. The couple was fascinated by the invention and decided to devote themselves to the marketing of fabrics to make the thong in its primitive version. They settled in Salvador (Brazil) and continued the business. Soon after they decided to export the exotic garment to Spain, a bold idea at the time of the Inquisition. When the fearsome religious court learned of their intentions, both were sentenced to hangthe sentence was carried out in April 1660”.
It then took centuries for the loincloth to become a significant piece of Western clothing. The modern one, as we know it today, has spread since the 1970s and its creation is attributed to the Austrian designer Rudi Gernreich, “also creator of the monokini, the first topless swimsuit”. Designer and activist, Gernreich entered the swimwear market with the thong, and in the same decade photographer Helmut Newton photographed supermodels Jerry Hall and Lisa Taylor wearing it in a 1975 Vogue shoot.
According to the Paìs, the garment arrived “like a breath of fresh air”, but its reception was not immediate and only the “hypersexualized fashion” of the late 90s and early 2000s, embodied by Gianni Versace or Tom Ford, as creative director of Gucci, cleared it. Until it became a pop symbol, to which the R&B singer Sisqó dedicated “Thong Song”, which in 2000 climbed the charts all over the world, obtaining four Grammy nominations.
Thus, showing the elastic of the thong (or the whole triangle, what was known as the “whale tail”) has become an “extraordinary trend”, not without controversy.