Underwear Musings

By Tess Mangiardi

Hello all! A lot has happened since my last post, and for some reason the most complex thing on my mind concerning the world of lingerie is underwear. Now, I don’t just sit in cafes and ponder existentially about underwear, but honestly it’s a weird thing for me. I have a mountain of underwear in my closet, somewhere close to the Island of Forgotten Bras that I mentioned a few posts ago. It’s not because I need that much underwear, because honestly I don’t, but before I moved away from home I was spoiled with the advantage of having a washer and dryer in my apartment. Now, there isn’t even a washer and dryer in my building and if I want to do my laundry I have to lug all my clothes in my arms for five blocks and pray to the Laundromat gods that the ATM isn’t broken so I can, you know, actually pay for it. I know this sounds like the ultimate first world problem, but it’s a hassle and not something I enjoy doing. So, for a while, I just decided it was easier to buy new underwear instead of being a normal person and lugging my laundry bag down the street. I just have too much schoolwork and too much going on in my head to think about rolling myself down the street with a pile of underwear in my hands. Plus, I’ve always just enjoyed buying underwear. It’s a guilty pleasure that I can’t seem to shake. I know, I know, I’m the worst. However, I’ve talked to other girls my age and I’m not the only one.

Anyway, I have a tendency to pop into Forever 21 or Kmart or whatever is most accessible at the moment and just pick out a few pairs of underwear that I know I wouldn’t mind having around. Let’s take a moment to talk about Kmart underwear. It’s honestly really strange. Joe Boxer or Hanes rolls their underwear up like deli meat and stuffs them in plastic bags that makes me feel like I’m buying a four pack of something I should be ashamed of. The plastic bags are adorned with overly happy women in her underwear, staring you down, pleading you with big, smiling eyes to just put the pack down and run away as fast as you can. Not only does buying them make me feel like I’m buying porn, the sizing never really makes any sense so I have to stand there for a ridiculously long time and stare at these uniform bags in constant wonder because I have absolutely no freaking idea what size I’m supposed to be. I don’t think the manufacturer does either, because they come in sizes as if they were jeans except 6 is supposed to be small, 7 medium, etc. I think someone got hired to pick up a pack, pick a number between 1 and 10, and hope for the best.  I’m a medium, which I guess means 7, but sometimes I’ll grab a pack of size 7’s, take them home, and realize that I could pass for an 80 year old women because they’re underwear attempting to transform themselves into high -wasted shorts. I’ve dubbed those ineffective purchases my “Mid Life Crisis Panties” and they’re stuffed somewhere deep beneath the mountain that is my underwear drawer.

I’m not sure what it is that makes me want to purchase more underwear than I need. Is it some sort of deep seeded need for consumerism? Or is it just because I’m lazy where it counts? This is something the world may never know, but until then, you can find me in an aisle in Kmart staring shamefully at packages of underwear, hanging like curtains off the wall.