Under the Wear

Is it just me, or are a lot of TV shows these days capitalizing on a current fascination with the '60s?

Well, I hope it's not just me, because I'm banking on your reader support here, thank ya very much.

A lot of us watch these period TV shows because we're gaga over vintage 1960s fashions and latter-day styles. We've got Mad Men, the period drama about a New York ad agency and the darling of History professors and style gazers everywhere, along with new fall shows like Pan Am and The Playboy Club. I've only seen a couple of episodes of Mad Men, and some clips of Pan Am, which follows the glamorous lives of air hostesses (decade appropriate language, yo) working for the airline of the show's title.

Pan Am (with Christina Ricci, above): It's all about the air candy.

But I can tell you this, which may be so obvious it doesn't bear saying: These shows represent a romanticized 1960s aesthetic, one in which cigarettes, Bourbon, gloves, pillbox hats, suits and ties are fetishized images. The characters who wear these clothes and use these objects are attractive and exciting but often unhappy and - this is the big one - dissatisfied.

We're meant to understand that these characters are repressed, limited by their social categories in a world where gender and race roles are as rigid as Don Draper's slick hairdo. We're also intended to be encouraged by, say, early whiffs of female empowerment through professional careers. After all, these are shows about work -- with nods to the high-flying stewardesses in Pan Am and the ambitious secretaries in Mad Men.

At the same time, as viewers we're taken in by the glamor of the characters' ability to smoke and drink freely, toss off inappropriate language, and speak and act without the burden of our modern policy of political correctness. Shows like Pan Am and Mad Men indulge in these freedoms, making theater out of what smells like lust for bygone social norms.

It's a weird paradox -- on the one hand, these shows are critiquing the follies of the past, and on the other they're enamoured with them. Hey, modern television, your nostalgia for a (fictional) era of glamorized masculinity and femininity is showing.

Joan Harris (played by Christina Hendricks) vamps it up in Mad Men.

So, what does this mean? Are we living in conservative times? Check your underwear, ladies.

Yup. I think you can judge the climate of an era based on women's underwear.  The '20 witnessed the end of the corset. The '50s brought the corset back in the form of a girdle. The '70s saw the death of girdles. The '90s introduced thongs. Now it's all about the Spanx and ShapeWear. Could this be a '60s revival?

Oh yeah, it could be. Think about the crisp, gender-specific clothing styles and confining, body-shaping women's underwear of the '60s. If you start to see clothing as a representation of social moods, you start to wonder why we wear what we do, and why we like what others wear - or wore, in the case of vintage fashion nostalgia.

Clothes make the man and the woman in period TV dramas, but there's also what's underneath to consider. I remember teen flick 10 Things I Hate About You came out in 1999, when I was ten years old. There's a scene in the movie when the popular younger sister and her love interest (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) sneak into the bedroom of the rebellious older sister (Julia Stiles) to dig up some details on her. What do they find but a pair of black panties in a dresser drawer. The popular younger sister quips that owning black underwear is a universal sign that a girl wants to have sex.

This scene was a serious topic of discussion in the girls' locker room in my fifth grade gym class. Some girls were totally behind the movie truth that black panties indicate that you're down to have sex, while others were all, "Nah, girl."

Life lesson? Never doubt that movies and television can teach (and misinform) us about the power and meaning of clothes.

My, what a big book you have, 10 Things I Hate About You heroine! You thinking about sex or Sylvia Plath?

I'm glad I can re-hash my fifth grade locker room stories for you, and pretend they have some kinda intellectual context. Back to modern TV: Why do we like shows set during the '60s so much? Why are we so hot on the glamor of '60s clothing styles? Suffice it to say that history in TV shows and movies (and even our own memories) is mostly romanticization that is based on how we're feeling and thinking now. And I'm thinking that TV's current love for this decade tells us something about the present. After all, you can't escape the present in a period piece -- it comes through, whether in the dialogue or the make-up, or more interestingly in the tone.

We're informed by these pop culture re-writes of the past -- and sometimes we're just as naïve about what we're watching as a fifth-grader gleaning social truths from a teen comedy. I don't think most folks watch Mad Men to draw out social commentary or reflect on what the show expresses about the present day -- at least not consciously. We're following its exciting plotlines. And we're drawn in by the sex appeal, and smitten with the vintage fashions. And that's cool. But for me, it's all about the underwear. Sometimes it's what's under the clothes that's more fascinating than the clothes themselves. Especially when they tell you something about the times you're livin' in.