From Queen Victoria’s mother’s pantaloons to Kim Kardashian’s ‘butt-lifters’ – an exhibition approximately the history of underwear explores the beautiful and bizarre inventions beneath our clothesWe’re approximately to leave the bustling conservation studios of the Victoria and Albert Museum when the curator Edwina Ehrman draws me aside. “What’s it actually like,” she asks quietly, to wear a corset?”She’s in the middle of putting together an exhibition of 200 items of underwear. All around us conservators are intently bent over pants and bras, and getting them alert for display. Given that many of the corsets in the studio are more than 200 years outmoded,I’m not surprised that she hasn’t tried any of them on. But Ehrman knows that I have been in and out of corsets and stays from the 1550s to the 1950s, during the course of making various TV programmes approximately historical fashion.
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Source: theguardian.com