Five Books for Lingerie Lovers

When Jennifer Wilson set out to, in her words, “investigate the political implications of cleavage,” for a piece in this week’s issue about how conservatives are trying to take sexy back, she didn’t realize how few women know their actual bra size. “That’s incredible to me, given how much space in the cultural imagination boobs occupy,” she told me. In the course of her reporting, she sampled a new size herself at Agent Provocateur, helped by the co-founder of Evie—a magazine that imagines itself “the conservative Cosmo”—who later sent her a lacey balconette push-up. “I didn’t know what to make of the fact,” Wilson writes, “that the only person who had ever gifted me lingerie was the editor of a magazine that had just published an article titled ‘Dear Men, Please Stop Drinking Beer. It’s Making You Effeminate and Infertile.’ ”

Wilson also watched Sydney Sweeney sing Garth Brooks’s “Friends in Low Places” at a pop-up event for her intimates brand SYRN, at Stagecoach (a.k.a. “Trumpchella”), and travelled to Bologna, Italy, to meet the seamstresses of La Perla (known as le perline, or “the little pearls”) who took to the streets to save their jobs. Mostly, she read a lot about lingerie.

Here is Jennifer Wilson’s annotated selection of her favorite books on the subject of undergarments.

“Cold Comfort Farm,” by Stella Gibbons

I watched the movie adaptation of Gibbons’s 1932 comic novel when I was a tween. Rufus Sewell as Seth Starkadder, a sweaty, primitive, insatiable farmhand with a secret intellectual passion for cinema, left a, let’s say, lasting impression. A sendup of “loam and lovechild” rural melodramas, the book follows Flora Poste, in from London to tidy up the messes made by her country relatives’ savage libidos. Her city friends are no saints themselves, though. One collects bras, at the time a newish terrain of underwear; her suitors are fittingly nicknamed “pioneers.”

“The Erotic History of Advertising,” by Tom Reichert

It’s often said that sex sells, but has anyone actually seen an earnings statement? Here, Reichert provides one. The book covers a hundred and fifty years of steamy advertising campaigns for everyday items from coffee (in one ad, from 1876, a woman’s hands are so occupied by her piping hot beverage that her robe starts to slip off) to mouthwash (the phrase “Always the bridesmaid, never the bride” was originally a Listerine ad)—and, of course, underwear. I learned that beefcake-y boxer-brief ads didn’t start with the likes of Marky Mark in his Calvins but with Jockey, which, in 1978, hired the Baltimore Orioles pitcher Jim Palmer to model a pair. “Women buy 70% of men’s underwear,” the company’s C.E.O. told Fortune.

“Selling Sexy: Victoria’s Secret and the Unraveling of an American Icon,” by Lauren Sherman and Chantal Fernandez

It turns out that the only thing more chaotic than Victoria’s Secret’s panty aisle during a ten-for-forty-dollars sale might be the corporation itself. This book is well stocked with juicy intel. My favorite part is the “mini-memoir” of the fictional Victoria that the company’s owner, Les Wexner, had commissioned in the nineties: Victoria Stewart-White gets her business acumen from her father, a “wry but quiet English financier”; her first lingerie shop becomes the “toast of London” after it’s frequented by her friends, as “all her friends are models”; and she marries a barrister and vacations in St. Barth’s, where she sunbathes topless (ironic, given the popularity of the brand’s swimwear).