58 The Times Magazinetop designers. Balenciaga’s unisex version costs
£150 and comes with a rainbow Gay Pride
waistband. In October 2020, Kim Kardashian
posed on Instagram in a low-cut open-back
dress from 36-year-old Matthew M Williams’
first collection for Givenchy – the house that
gave the world Audrey Hepburn’s classic LBD
in Breakfast at Tiffany’s now adorns them with
the visible scarlet “T” of a thong. Fifteen years
ago, this common enough sighting – and even
then, common was the operative word – was
known as a “whale tail”. These days, it is
something close to couture.
Emma Ilori, head of womenswear elevation
at the designer boutique Flannels, says sales
of thongs are up 40 per cent on the year.
“It’s clear that daring lingerie and risqué,
exposed thongs are back,” she says. “So we’ve
bought heavily into Agent Provocateur this
season to meet the demand for thongs.”
The high street is following suit. M&S
reports that sales of thongs have been rising
consistently since 2019 – they now account for
14 per cent of pants sales, as opposed to fewer
than one in every ten pairs five years ago.
The store has around a third more on sale
this year than last, in line with the trend for
tighter, more revealing clothes as the glamour-
sapping pandemic draws to a close.
The thong’s original raison d’être was to
banish the visible lines of underwear through
clothing by eliminating the parts of pants
that dug into the softer skin of the buttocks.
(In fact, it was created in the Seventies by
the swimwear designer Rudi Gernreich in
response to the city of Los Angeles banning
nude bathing.) However, like so many lifestyle
signifiers, thongs became less about function
than fashion the more women bought into
them. By the Noughties, they were designed
not to be invisibly smooth but to be seen,
stringy straps peeping over the low-rise jeans
of the millennium. The supercool New York
designer Heron Preston revived exactly this
look on the catwalk in 2019, mimicking Tom
Ford’s Gucci and Jean Paul Gaultier’s shows
in the late Nineties.
Back then, every independent young
woman was in a thong whether her outfit
required it or not. Paris Hilton wore them,
but so did Monica Lewinsky. Bridget Jones’s
was an important plot point, with its pulling
potential evaluated in stark contrast to what
she, in the 2001 film, called “scary stomach-
holding-in pants very popular with grannies”.
In the video for I’m a Slave 4 U the same year,
Britney Spears wore a pink leather thong on
top of her jeans like some madly sexed-up
comic-book superhero.
In their early Noughties heyday, G-strings
accounted for more than a third of knicker
sales at Debenhams. Topshop and H&M used
to sell three for a tenner, offering them up
on racks by the colourful multitude, deckedgaudily along an entire wall like pick-and-mix
sweets. There were frilly ones and slogan ones,
bejewelled versions and seamless varieties.
There were high-waisted “support thongs”
that offered to flatten your stomach while
letting everything else hang out at the back,
and minuscule T-strings that amounted to
little more than a mesh triangle on a Möbius
strip – perfect for the pink and glittery slit-to-
the-waist Julien Macdonald gown that Kelly
Brook wore in 2000 to the premiere of
(checks notes) Snatch.
Because it felt innately frilly and funny,
the G-string’s role in the hyper-sexualisation
of the young women who came of age and
wore them to school during the era (hi!) went
unnoticed. Ditto its mainstreaming of what
we now understand to be porn culture: after
all, the fully bare Hollywood bikini wax is
the ebony to the thong’s ivory. Pole dancing
for fitness, skimpy clothing as a sign of self-
assertion – these were tenets of what was,
at the time, dubbed “thong feminism”.
In 2002, Argos was selling thongs for
girls aged 9 to 16. By the time Britney’s
was captured in an upskirt shot during her
turbulent 2007 phase, tastes had moved on
to the French knickers, boy shorts and high-
waisted Fifties pin-up pants of Dita von Teese
and Katy Perry. When the crash came a
year later, it was assumed that only strippers- whose business boomed during the Great
Recession – were still wearing them. When
they featured in Vogue in 2016 it was as an
out-of-step museum piece, a scold’s bridle
for the nethers.
It stands to reason, then, that neither
I nor any of my contemporaries want to
wear thongs again. So why are those whose
crevices have not yet endured them chafing
at the opportunity?
“Retro fashion centres on a new generation
discovering a look,” says Susanna Cordner,
archives manager at the London College
of Fashion and curator of the V&A’s 2016
Undressed exhibition. “They pick and choose
their references and perhaps ignore the
problematic connotations. I don’t think it’s
coincidence but it could be unconscious.”
Somebody pass these young women the
Canesten. Is there – and I’m asking for a
friend worried her knicker drawer is stuck
in a fuddy-duddy rut – such a thing as a
thong for grown-ups?
“Our customers find ours supercomfy and
they like the seamless sides,” says Jo Rossell,
owner of lingerie brand Rossell England. Her
thongs – organic jersey in shades of bordeaux,
blush and apricot – are chic and minimal.
“Thongs never went away for us,” she says.
“It’s about personal preference.”
Different strokes for different folks, as
they say. Or in this case, different ruts for
different butts. n
ow do you feel when you open your
wardrobe? Invigorated? Organised?
Unlikely. If yours, like mine, is a
haphazard and stress-inducing cram
of things you used to like and now
don’t – or worse, don’t like but tend
to use – January is the perfect time
for an audit. Or, as fashion types like
to call it, an edit.
No need to go mad in a fit of new year self-
improvement pique, and a cull doesn’t have to
mean a replacement spree. Trends roll around
so slowly these days that most of what you
have will soldier on indefinitely. Yet now is
the time to review what’s in there – freeing up
space on your rails is almost as good for you
as going to the gym. Almost. Here’s what to
keep and what to ditch (ie pack away) now.Ditch Parkas Keep Padded puffer jackets
There was a time when a furry hood was the
signifier of urban elegance, but times move
on and the coolest outerwear is now more
Michelin Man than Madchester. If you love
your parka to bits, as I do, then this advice will
be hard to hear, but it’s worth taking on board:
removing the fur trim will extend its lifespan.Keep Fake fur
Despite what I just said, the BFJ (big furry
jacket) is alive and well – alive not being the
operative word, given these teddy bear-ish
numbers are fake. Any other type of fur is
very definitely a no-no.Keep Kitten heels and clogs
It might seem as though these are two of the
silliest styles of shoe known to man, but please
keep the faith. I bought a pair of Birkenstock
clogs during the first lockdown and now
I intend to be buried in them.Ditch
or keep?
Dysfunctional wardrobe
driving you to despair? Time
for an audit – Harriet Walker
on the pieces that deserve
their place and those that
can safely be packed away
H
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