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.
PHOTO: NY TIMES
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.
PHOTO: NY TIMES
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.
"During the growth period, everyone was building their wardrobe of thongs, so everything you bought was thong, thong, thong," he said, adding that for the last four years, thong sales grew by 8 percent each year.
And while the thong still represents 24 percent of the US$2.5 billion annual market in women's underwear, Cohen said, it is no longer growing. "It has peaked out," he said.
There are many reasons. The thong probably reached its comfort level with consumers, as women who were game enough to try the thong for a year or two have emerged from the delirious consumer hypnosis that often accompanies popular trends and realized that, well, the thong just looks awful on them.
Underwear designers have also introduced new styles, such as the boy short, a hip-hugging brief with leg openings that hug the bottom of the buttocks and extend further down the legs than traditional women's briefs. And the boy short can be made in whisper-thin microfiber materials that in combination with wide lacy trim almost eliminate the panty-line threat.
"The boy short really took away from the thong," Cohen said.
At Cosabella, one of the companies that popularized the thong, the boy short is the fastest-growing item, said Brooke Melzer, a company spokeswoman.
"We're known for our thongs, but boy shorts are everybody's favorite right now," she said. The thong is still the company's No. 1 seller, but when Melzer and her team went to the MTV Music Awards to hand out freebies to stars, she was surprised by the response.
"All the celebrities were like, `Hey, do you have any boy shorts with you?'" she said.
Even at Victoria's Secret, thong sales are down, said Monica Mitro, executive vice president for public relations. In a departure from previous collections, Victoria's Secret bra-and-panty sets that once offered a choice between a thong or a panty with more coverage now limit the consumer to the latter.
Some other retailers report that the thong is still a popular seller. "The thong is alive and well at Bloomingdale's," said Kal Ruttenstein, the fashion director of the department store. "But the square-cut-bottom panties and the boy shorts are surprisingly big sellers."
Perhaps the thong's continuing appeal and popularity lie in its utility, not its sexuality, said Deborah Lloyd, executive vice president of design for Banana Republic.
"Every woman is going to need a thong underpant for certain clothes, and that is just what has happened to it," Lloyd said. "It has become more of a function piece, not an outwardly sexy piece. Something to take care of panty lines."
"The best seller was always the classic brief, and then the thong," Lloyd said. "But then the boy short came in and split the sales of the thong." Consumers wanted a more playful, sportier look, one they could even wear around the house.
"You can't really wear a thong around the house," Lloyd said. "I mean, not really."
Part of the thong's waning dominance could be that it is simply yesterday's news, a one-night stand whose raw, street-tough charm has now dimmed in the cool corporate light of morning.
Maybe women are tired of looking like strippers and now want to look like debutantes. Helen Fisher, author of Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love (Henry Holt), said human attraction is based on mystery and novelty, and the thong is no longer mysterious or novel.
"Going from revealing to less revealing can be novel and exciting, and that will probably happen with the thong," she said. "Less revealing, more withholding, could now be seen as more erotic."
Certainly, American clothing designers are now embracing a more modest look, their focus shifting from low-slung jeans and exposed midriffs to high-waisted trousers and cardigans.
Dressing is looser and easier, less evocative of Super Bowl wardrobe malfunctions than it is of the Dust Bowl era. And the shift on the outside clearly influences what one wears on the inside, said Colette L. Wong, a professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology who teaches a class in the history of undergarments.
"Everything used to be skintight, contoured to the body, made of spandex, and now it is moving away from the body," Wong said. "If you're wearing a soft drapey pant that is loose and flowing, you may not want a thong. A boy short would be perfect, or something even softer."
At fashion shows in New York last week, a few designers showed underpants as part of streetwear collections. At Angelrox, models wore boy shorts with ruffles in the shape of angel wings. The panties, worn underneath flowing skirts or dresses, formed subtle shadows in the shapes of angels' wings on the models' behinds.
Steve Colbert, dreadlocked and wearing a crocheted cap, was covering the show for Floss magazine and sipping from a cup filled with Champagne.
"Love those panties," Colbert said enthusiastically during the program. "I like something that covers a bit more than a thong does. I'm just so over the thong. And everybody wears it. And not everybody should wear it, do you know what I'm saying?"
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