Monday 29 February 2016

Luscious lingerie round up for February with www.lingerie.co.uk


 Dita’s tips for lingerie


We don’t know about you, but we can’t get enough of Dita Von Teese. As the burlesque star who single-handedly reinvented the art for a modern audience, and as a style icon who ensures that the lingerie she wears is as much a fashion statement as a provocation, she’s taught us all how to balance everyday life with the glamour we seek.

In Vogue she gave some top tips that we found fascinating, particularly this one: Showing (and wearing) less can always be more. This is the beauty of lingerie! No matter what your personality is, you can be whomever you want underneath it all. I don’t bare much skin offstage; I like my hemlines below my knee, and I like dresses with shapely lines that might show a touch of cleavage, if any. My uniform” for seduction is a shapely black dress with French-heeled seamed stockings, sexy black pumps in patent or matte leather, and black leather opera gloves. It’s mysterious and sensual at the same time.

What a wonderful statement! We got some stunning seamed stockings if you’d like to attempt the Dita approach and the point about hemlines below the knee is fantastic because it means you’re not flagging up your seductive underwear, just gently hinting at it.

A dramatic glimpse of lingerie history


We wish we were in Houston to see this show! Lynn Nottage has written a fascinating play about the women who created lingerie in the early 20th century, before mass production became the norm. Drawing on items found in her grandmother’s possession, such as old clothing, photographs and magazines, this playwright has imagined how life might have been for a woman of her grandmother’s age, working as a young seamstress.



Isolation was the norm, the piecework was created without her ever meeting the women for whom she created negligees and other lingerie and she could only have imagined the lives they led, for which such garments were necessary. Women who worked in the lingerie industry have often been invisible, whether they were piece workers like the star of Intimate Apparel or designers who never received credit for their work or even the lingerie models who paraded the catwalks in the days before supermodels existed. This glimpse into the role of women, particularly women of colour, in the creation of the most extravagant lingerie, sounds like a real treat, and opens up a historical perspective on work, fashion and social relations that we’re always keen to explore. If the show ever comes to the UK, we’ll be in the audience!


Friday 12 February 2016

Lingerie innovations, Valentine’s Day shopping and what men think of underwear …

Selina Bond recently graduated from De Montfort University’s Contour Fashion degree course and was given the accolade New Designer of the Year at this year’s UK Lingerie Awards - she’s also the first designer to win this award without having a collection ready to retail. So what was it that so impressed the judges who included experts from John Lewis and Rigby and Peller? It was her use of technology, specifically carbon fibre, the material used in Formula 1 racing cars and in space vehicles.

The idea came from her father, who used to work for the Williams Formula 1 team repairing cars damaged in racing - he even helped her create moulds for the carbon fibre lingerie she designed. The pieces, shaped like breastplates or bodices are lined with verve and lace trimmed before being lacquered. Apparently they are lightweight and very rigid, and the models who wore them in her graduate show said they were wonderful for the posture!

Men in lingerie …


If you want a laugh, watch three men trying to get into women’s underwear! There is a more serious point to this video though. The idea was to see what men thought of lingerie if they were the ones wearing it - and their responses are priceless, including, ‘I don’t understand what’s sexy about fishnets, unless you get massive boners at the thought of the sea’ and ‘I feel like a fish caught in a six-pack of beer.’ But it just goes to make the point that lingerie myths are alive and well and as the chaps in corsets concluded ‘girls’ don’t need to be wearing clothes that aren’t comfortable.  We agree - lingerie worn by women for men is rarely worth it, which is why we stock lingerie that women love to wear and men love to see women in!

How to shop online for Valentine’s Day lingerie with your lover


If you’re fed up with receiving the kind of Valentine’s Day gift that makes you cringe or smirk, perhaps this is the year to get organised. By which we mean, set the scene with candles, something good to drink and some music you both find sexy, and then sit and shop for your Valentine’s Day gifts to each other online. There’s some evidence that shopping for sexy gifts is mutually rewarding - not only does picking out a sensual gift together create sexual anticipation but the process of choosing sexy underwear as a couple creates clearer communication and more powerful bonds.

There’s another reason to shop together online - it helps you learn each other’s fantasy vocabulary. Fantasy is one of those strange areas, we all know what we like, but explaining it, even to ourselves, let alone to somebody else can be complicated. This means that discussing why you like the look of something can open up new areas of your relationship. It means you develop a shared language about what turns you both on and stops you being so subtle that your partner can’t actually be certain what you want.

Finally, our love of sexy things will evolve and change throughout our lives, and shopping online allows us to explore new ideas without feeling too challenged. So if your lingerie life begin with a silk nightie, it might still evolve to quite specialist and kinky undies, whilst for those who already have a rich and varied range of lingerie items, there are always other kinds of experience to try such as our MaskedDesires kit with a range of elegant accessories to develop your fantasy life.