This is the first instalment of our three-part series on the evolution of erotic underwear — from garments hidden by social convention to pieces now regarded as fashion, craftsmanship, and wearable art. To understand where intimate fashion stands today, we start with the era when it was rarely meant to be seen at all.
The Victorian era conjures images of restriction: high collars, tightly laced waists, long skirts, gloves, and a near-obsessive concern with respectability that became visual shorthand for nineteenth-century femininity. Public life demanded modesty and self-control, especially from women, and fashion reflected that by concealing the body under layers of structured clothing.
Beneath those layers, though, an entirely different world existed.
Research by the Victoria and Albert Museum shows that Victorian women wore an extraordinary range of undergarments: finely constructed corsets, embroidered chemises, lace-trimmed drawers, silk stockings, bustles, corset covers, ribbons, decorative petticoats. Far from being merely practical foundations for outer garments, many were made from fine cottons and silk, finished with delicate embroidery and hand-stitching skilled enough to count as craftsmanship in its own right.
This contradiction sits at the heart of Victorian fashion: the more disciplined and respectable a woman was expected to appear in public, the more elaborate her private wardrobe often became. Beauty didn't disappear beneath clothing so much as move underneath it, and intimate garments became one of the few places where refinement, luxury, and personal taste could exist quietly, beyond the public gaze. No garment illustrates this paradox better than the corset itself.
Modern popular culture tends to portray every Victorian corset as an instrument of oppression. Extreme tight-lacing certainly existed, but historians increasingly argue that this simplified image overlooks a more complex reality — one the V&A's own research into corsets, crinolines, and bustles explores in depth. For many women, corsets provided structure, posture support, and the fashionable silhouette of the period, and their design evolved continuously throughout Queen Victoria's reign as technology, health ideals, and ideas of femininity all shifted.
Perhaps the greatest misconception about Victorian underwear is that it was purely functional, when in reality it was already becoming emotional. Long before lingerie became something women openly chose for confidence or self-expression, intimate clothing had begun carrying symbolic meaning: refinement, status, discipline, and, increasingly, individuality — even if almost nobody else ever saw it.
At the edges of this hidden world, another visual language was quietly emerging. Leather riding gloves, polished boots, equestrian harnesses, military belts, and rubberised materials entered everyday life through industry, sport, and uniform, and none of them were originally designed to be erotic. But because they belonged to spaces associated with authority, discipline, and physical power, and remained largely outside conventional domestic fashion, they gradually acquired an aura of mystery.
Objects rarely seen in intimate settings tend to become charged with cultural meaning; what a society keeps hidden has a way of becoming psychologically powerful. That's precisely where leather's appeal came from. It would eventually move from practical material to artistic medium, but in the nineteenth century it remained a quiet symbol of transgression, simply because it existed outside accepted ideas of feminine dress.
Expert Commentary: Princess Petra
Has the mainstream embrace of darker aesthetics changed their meaning, or has it simply allowed more women to express parts of themselves that were always there?
"There will always be some kind of stigma around darker aesthetics, especially with certain subcultures, because the common association with belonging to a particular group is completely surface-level to a closed-minded person. When it comes to materials like leather, the meaning is very personal — it can be worn because someone's following a trend, as a symbol of their desires, in a more intimate moment to feel different, or simply because they like how that piece looks. We're fortunate to live in an era where, at least where I'm from in the UK, women can express themselves fully. Exposure piques interest, so the suppression we saw before has subsided."
Looking back, the Victorian period planted the first seeds of what erotic fashion would later become — not because it celebrated sexual freedom (it clearly didn't), but because it created such a striking contrast between public conformity and private identity. That hidden layer became the place where craftsmanship, fantasy, and personal expression could begin to grow, and it was this hidden language that the twentieth century would slowly bring into the light.
What began beneath layers of fabric gradually became part of a much larger cultural conversation about femininity, desire, and self-expression. The intimate garment was no longer destined to stay entirely private: as photography, cinema, popular culture, and changing ideas of femininity transformed how women were represented, lingerie itself began to acquire a new role.
In the next part of our series, we move into the mid-twentieth century, when pin-up culture, Hollywood, and the golden age of glamour began turning lingerie into a visual language of seduction. What had once been hidden would become an increasingly visible expression of style, confidence, and identity.