Late last week, Mark Peress, a co-owner of Lingerie & Company on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, ruminated with a customer on the fate of the thong.
"Sure, you have the thong," Peress said, tossing a handful of skimpy mesh thongs onto the glass-topped counter. "But now, you also have these," he said, piling up an assortment of women's panties.
There were bikinis, briefs and tap pants cut in luscious satin. There were generously cut tangas, lace hipsters, low-rise briefs, ribboned boy shorts and a complicated model Peress calls the tap-thong hybrid.
The array was dizzying, the fabric plentiful, and the message clear: more modest underwear is beginning to muscle out the thong panty, that racy totem of female sexuality once flashed by celebrities and rapped about on the radio.
Adam Lippes, founder of the lingerie line Adam + Eve, said the reason is simple: thong fatigue.
"The thong got skinnier and skinnier, and women got tired of it," he said. "And they got sick and tired of seeing string hanging out of the top of every celebrity's jeans. It's just gross. I think it went too far over the edge and enough is enough."
The thong has saturated popular culture since the late 1990s. At first, clingy new fabrics and body-conscious fashions demanded an undergarment that prevented visible panty lines, the dread syndrome known as VPL. And so the thong, imported from the world of exotic dance, was introduced.
The thong, with straps worn high over the hips, exposed by fashionable low-rise jeans and Juicy Couture sweat pants, became a public icon. Sisqo rhapsodized about it in his Thong Song. Abercrombie & Fitch introduced a line of thong underpants for 10-year-old girls printed with phrases like "Wink Wink" and "Eye Candy."
Web sites began to chronicle bad celebrity thong moments. ("Ginger Spice in a fiery red thong with the tag hanging out -- CLASSY!" reads a caption on whale-tail.com.) And then there was Monica Lewinsky, who forced historians and authors like David Halberstam, David Gergen, Bob Woodward and Kati Marton to address the issue of the thong in their books on the Clinton presidency.
Just as Madonna made bras a public garment in the 1980s, Lewinsky, Britney Spears and Paris Hilton transformed women's panties into a provocative garment intended for public display.
The thong underpant became a cultural touchstone, the very symbol of the tease. It caught on at a time when lad magazines like Maxim and FHM, with their photographs of panty-clad but never entirely nude women, took over from the old-man's magazine, Playboy, with its gauzy, fully naked pinups; when adolescent love was celebrated with the soul-free hookup, a form of physical connection without the burden of intimacy.
Lewinsky flashed her thong to begin an affair that didn't feature real sex, at least by the definition of one of the parties. Spears, the celebrity perhaps most associated with the thong, embraced the virgin/temptress paradox with cutting accuracy. Audiences could look, but they could never touch. The thong is an invitation, not a promise.
But the thong as mere undergarment may have reached its tipping point. While demand remains healthy, sales of the thong have flattened, said Marshal Cohen, chief apparel analyst for the NPD Group, a market research firm in Port Washington, New York.
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