Brits' growing love of lingerie

If you really must know, they’re peppermint-green satin, edged with a ripple of tiny ruffles. I think Lizzie Jagger wore them in the ad campaign. Or was it Megan Fox? Either way, they are gorgeous; far too pretty to spend today trapped between my derrière and an office chair, but there you have it: my pants are a work of art. Yours are probably pretty fancy, too. Lacy. Ribboned. Coquettish. The kind of thing that was once the preserve of escorts, newlyweds and the urban French.

We Britons, of course, used to be ridiculed for our pants. It was one of our stereotyped ineptitudes; like our teeth and our cuisine, our undies were usually off-colour, under-loved and overlooked. I spent my early adulthood in innocuous cotton tangas, and barely gave them a second thought. Mine, if I am honest, generally came in a particular shade of chewing-gum grey, one of those colours that, if it were by Farrow & Ball, would look marvellous in a Georgian drawing room. Dead cod. Spume. They featured nothing more exotic than a St Michael label and an air of bored capability, the kind of pants that would never let you down, bless them, but they’d never lift you up either; never transport you, make you sigh, have you clutch them to your chest, pirouetting around in dizzy delight. Nope. Back then, pants had a job to do. Now move along please, nothing to see here.

There were occasional bursts of excitement, though. The first I can recall was the triumphant arrival in 1987 of the body by Donna Karan. This was a garment that would lie around the house, disembodied and odd-looking, like Peter Pan’s shadow. Some had sleeves. Pants with sleeves! No wonder we all went nuts for them. You could wear them with footless tights and a ra-ra skirt, and there you were, dressed and ready for the wine bar. At the time, briefly, the body was a liberation for women. It gave us a lovely sinuous silhouette; nothing to tuck in, no bra, no hassle. But it was also, we soon came to realise, a total pain in the jacksie, those under-tension gussets heading ever north as if in search of prey. Who doesn’t remember fumbling around in a darkened loo cubicle, desperately trying to locate the poppers in the warm netherworld of one’s undercarriage? And if you didn’t popper up properly, you ran the awful risk of returning to your bar stool with your flaps akimbo. Factor in Eighties shoulder pads, clip-on earrings and sticky-up hair and you’ve got a very perilous ensemble right there.

Then along came the Nineties, and with them, the Ubiquitous Thong. I threw out my entire collection of insipid pants and mildly diverting bodies, and replaced them with several yards of dental floss. With the perspective of time, it’s easy to see what a dog’s breakfast thongs were for most of us, coinciding as they did with our taste for low-slung hipsters. The sight of an inquisitive G-string emerging from a waistband, cresting a muffin top to arrive at a tramp stamp, is one of the totemic visions of the fag end of last century. How did that happen? And why did I tolerate an entire decade perpetually goosed by my own underwear? Thongs had the added disadvantage of demanding you walk backwards out of the bedroom for fear your husband/lover/flatmate/cat might glimpse your naked buttocks, unsupported by the kindly camouflage of knicker fabric. Such ignominy.

Mercifully, maternity pants saved me from all that. I had never seen pants so spacious, not since I happened to glimpse my grandmother spooning herself into a plaster-coloured panty-girdle some time in the early Seventies. For me, maternity pants were an enormous relief. It was like moving from a student flat into a detached house with garden and carriage drive. And when I climbed out of those, lo, the world had moved on. Everyone had seen Bridget Jones and discovered massive pants. In their wake came the marginally less massive boy shorts, those magnificent butt-loving beasts, fashioned to sit on the hip and cradle the cheeks. The glory! The comfort! Not particularly riveting, I’ll grant you. But they did manage the twin marvels of flatter and fit at the same time, which was pretty much a first for pants

Then, bam. Kylie’s bum changed the world. It was 2001. And there it was, that perfect peach of a posterior, captured by Agent Provocateur in one of its first fruity online campaigns. For the record, that viral of Minogue astride a red velvet bucking bronco, wearing woo-hoo panties and a libidinous smile, became the most successful of all time, clocking up 350 million hits on YouTube. Suddenly, hot frillies went mainstream. You simply had to be interested in them or you were a frump, a schlump, a hopeless case, the kind of woman who didn’t clean under her fingernails and left a ring round the bath. If you still did comfy cottons, you were over 70, under 12, or about as highly sexed as a button mushroom. While we fixated on It bags and red-soled Louboutins, on chavs and WAGs, it was, in fact, deep within the knicker drawers of the nation that the decade’s true fashion revolution was wrought.

Now, of course, we’re all aflame, seduced by polka-dot cami knickers and lace-trimmed cheeky-pants. If you’re Lady Gaga or an X Factor wannabe, you’ll be wearing them out and about, even in a cold snap. If not, you’ll still wear them, under the work suit or the daily jeans. Plenty of us do. Mintel reports that women have a “wardrobe of underwear” these days. Elle Macpherson Intimates is now the single bestselling lingerie line in Britain (you may well have Caprice, Kelly Brook and Elizabeth Hurley languishing in your laundry basket), and most of us will gladly, hungrily, buy ourselves pants “as a treat”.

“It’s a silky little secret you carry around with you all day,” says Danae Shell, editor of Knickers Blog (yes, a blog about knickers; we didn’t have that a decade ago either). None of this, incidentally, is about putting out; it’s not about flirting and nailing a man. This time, it’s personal. Like diamonds, weight loss and leg waxing, buying fancy pants is something we do for ourselves, not for our men.

Personally, my pants are on fire. I have Princesse tam.tam chiffon knickers with trailing pink ribbons, plush velvet ones by La Perla with darling covered buttons, and gaudy silk ones from Pucci in a heady swirl of ice-cream colours. I’ve got crazy delights that look like angel breath, cost a bomb and ought by rights to spend most of their brief existence flung on the back of a chair in a hotel room.

I have baskets of ruffled tulle and guipure lace, all sitting there, waiting for attention like tarts in a brothel. I’m not even going to mention my extensive arsenal of solution lingerie, those high-tech contraptions that promise to scoop you up, suck you in and send you out half the woman you truly are. It’s only in the past few years, don’t forget, that we’ve expected pants to be quite so crafty and competent; plenty of women now go to parties cocooned, beneath their clingy dress, in a knee-to-nape Lycra condom. It’s like having an instant diet right there in your bedside drawer. (Although, much like Botox, you can always tell if a woman’s wearing Spanx at a party: her belly and bottom are toughened and immovable, bollard-like, and she doesn’t go to the loo as often as you might expect. If she’s had Botox as well, the only part that moves of its own volition will be her hair in the breeze as a champagne cork flies past.)

Given all this choice, it’s little wonder that UK underwear sales grew by 40 per cent in the decade to 2009 – so much so that we’re even beating the French at their own game: British women blow an average £71 a year on lingerie, outspending the French by a whole £1. To service this new national panty penchant, thousands of bijou brands have emerged, companies called AnatomicBomb or Peachie Keen, Mint Siren or Buttress & Snatch. There are showgirl scanties from Immodesty Blaize, hemp harlot pants from Enamore, handmade confections from Coco de Mer – not to mention the satin nothings from Russian super-brand Wild Orchid, which recently set up shop in London. The nation’s rumps have never had it so good.

Needless to say, the major retailers are eager to get in on the act. While Marks & Spencer still dwarfs its rivals with control of more than a quarter of the UK market, over the past few years, supermarkets and chains have increasingly relied on their underwear departments to lift sales. Today, you’ll find perfectly delightful lingerie at New Look, Primark and Asda. Tesco, on the scent of a golden goose, recently engaged Ultimo’s Michelle Mone to create Diamond Boutique, a range of “designer” undies fronted by Frank Lampard’s ex, Elen Rives. The pants, with their upmarket rococo ribbons and lace, may look the business, but they sell for seven quid a pair (Tesco claims that its £14 luxury silk bra would retail elsewhere for £40). Over at Bhs, Sir Philip Green is not resting on his rump either. He is hoping to wrest women away from the lingerie floor of M&S with a posh new retro-inspired line called Bellissima – yours for under a tenner. Meanwhile, Ann Summers has put down its dildo to target the “everyday lingerie customer” (they’re sewing up crotches at the Surrey HQ as we speak).

Brits' growing love of lingerie