When Jennifer Wilson set outto, in her words, “investigate the political implications of cleavage,” for a piece in this week’s issue about how conservatives are trying to take sexy back, she didn’t realize how few women know their actual bra size. “That’s incredible to me, given how much space in the cultural imagination boobs occupy,” she told me. In the course of her reporting, she sampled a new size herself at Agent Provocateur, helped by the co-founder of Evie—a magazine that imagines itself “the conservative Cosmo”—who later sent her a lacey balconette push-up. “I didn’t know what to make of the fact,” Wilson writes, “that the only person who had ever gifted me lingerie was the editor of a magazine that had just published an article titled ‘Dear Men, Please Stop Drinking Beer. It’s Making You Effeminate and Infertile.’ ”
Wilson also watched Sydney Sweeney sing Garth Brooks’s “Friends in Low Places” at a pop-up event for her intimates brand SYRN, at Stagecoach (a.k.a. “Trumpchella”), and travelled to Bologna, Italy, to meet the seamstresses of La Perla (known as le perline, or “the little pearls”) who took to the streets to save their jobs. Mostly, she read a lot about lingerie.
威尔逊还在 Stagecoach 音乐节（又名“特朗普切拉”）上，观看了西德尼·斯威尼（Sydney Sweeney）为她的内衣品牌 SYRN 举办的快闪活动中演唱加斯·布鲁克斯（Garth Brooks）的《低处的朋友》；她还前往意大利博洛尼亚，拜访了 La Perla 的缝纫女工们——她们被称为 le perline，即“小珍珠”——这些女工走上街头抗议，只为保住自己的工作。不过大多数时候，她读了很多关于内衣的书。
Here is Jennifer Wilson’s annotated selection of her favorite books on the subject of undergarments.
I watched the movie adaptation of Gibbons’s 1932 comic novel when I was a tween. Rufus Sewell as Seth Starkadder, a sweaty, primitive, insatiable farmhand with a secret intellectual passion for cinema, left a, let’s say, lasting impression. A sendup of “loam and lovechild” rural melodramas, the book follows Flora Poste, in from London to tidy up the messes made by her country relatives’ savage libidos. Her city friends are no saints themselves, though. One collects bras, at the time a newish terrain of underwear; her suitors are fittingly nicknamed “pioneers.”
It’s often said that sex sells, but has anyone actually seen an earnings statement? Here, Reichert provides one. The book covers a hundred and fifty years of steamy advertising campaigns for everyday items from coffee (in one ad, from 1876, a woman’s hands are so occupied by her piping hot beverage that her robe starts to slip off) to mouthwash (the phrase “Always the bridesmaid, never the bride” was originally a Listerine ad)—and, of course, underwear. I learned that beefcake-y boxer-brief ads didn’t start with the likes of Marky Mark in his Calvins but with Jockey, which, in 1978, hired the Baltimore Orioles pitcher Jim Palmer to model a pair. “Women buy 70% of men’s underwear,” the company’s C.E.O. told Fortune.
It turns out that the only thing more chaotic than Victoria’s Secret’s panty aisle during a ten-for-forty-dollars sale might be the corporation itself. This book is well stocked with juicy intel. My favorite part is the “mini-memoir” of the fictional Victoria that the company’s owner, Les Wexner, had commissioned in the nineties: Victoria Stewart-White gets her business acumen from her father, a “wry but quiet English financier”; her first lingerie shop becomes the “toast of London” after it’s frequented by her friends, as “all her friends are models”; and she marries a barrister and vacations in St. Barth’s, where she sunbathes topless (ironic, given the popularity of the brand’s swimwear).
According to one survey, eighty per cent of women wear the wrong bra size. As I learned, I was among them. Harrington, who for fourteen years ran the popular blog the Lingerie Addict, will teach you in this book how to measure yourself at home, alongside other handy tips. Fingernails always snagging your pantyhose as you put them on? It turns out, there’s such a thing as “hosiery gloves.”
That famous scene from the first movie, of Renée Zellweger deciding between “sexy knickers” and fat-sucking “granny panties” ahead of a romantic rendezvous with her boss (Hugh Grant), isn’t in Fielding’s novel. However, in this later installment, Jones, a widow, is back on the market again. A friend urges her to buy a black slip from La Perla, teasing, “I think, when you were last doing this, they were called ‘petticoats.’ ” These days, “clean girl” underwear brands like Cou Cou Intimates are selling racier versions of the granny panty, rebranded as the “French brief.” I procured a pair at the company’s eco-feminist-themed summer pop-up. Who says women can’t have it all?
第一部电影中那个著名场景——蕾妮·齐薇格（Renée Zellweger）在与老板（休·格兰特饰）浪漫约会前，在“性感内裤”和收腹的“奶奶内裤”之间犹豫不决——其实并不在菲尔丁的小说里。然而，在这部后续作品中，琼斯成了寡妇，重新回到婚恋市场。一位朋友怂恿她去 La Perla 买一件黑色衬裙，打趣道：“我想，你上次做这种事的时候，它们还叫‘衬裙’呢。”如今，像 Cou Cou Intimates 这样的“干净女孩”内衣品牌正在售卖更性感的奶奶内裤版本，并将其重新命名为“法式平角裤”。我在该公司以生态女性主义为主题的夏季快闪店里买了一条。谁说女人不能什么都要？
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“Switzy,” by Emma Cline. The Booker Prize-nominated novel was released just yesterday, but it’s already the talk of the literati. Our books editor Namara Smith says that “Cline specializes in lonely people on the margins in glamorous but hostile social worlds—in ‘Switzy,’ it’s David, a former executive en route to a euthanasia clinic in Zurich, in a jet borrowed from his ex-boss and not-quite-friend. As the book goes on and David’s defenses are stripped away, Cline builds up an exquisitely detailed portrait of an unfulfilled life.”
“Fruit Fly,” by Josh Silver. New York magazine’s Book Gossip newsletter posited that this novel, which has now been optioned by A24, was the “sleeper hit of the summer.” It’s about a writer who goes to great, ethically dubious lengths to cure her block.
The staff writer Jill Lepore is loathing:
特约撰稿人吉尔·勒波尔（Jill Lepore）吐槽：
I miss old-fashioned spam. “Readers keep mentioning the donkey with strong opinions,” read an e-mail I got this morning, at 9:12 A.M., peak e-mail-checking hour. That’s already a red flag, but, then again, the e-mail wasn’t the kind of sus you need to put Pangram on: it was nothing but tells.
Every day and all day long, I, like every other writer or aspiring writer, get some version of this A.I. crap—e-mails purporting to be from readers and book clubs and publicists and authors and publishers and literary agents and podcast hosts, messages that offer the one thing all writers pant for: readers. “What immediately caught my attention,” they’ll begin. Or “What really stood out for me.” A reader! A reader! A reader! a quiet voice says inside. But, no, it’s a machine.
“I’m Sophia Bennett, a book marketer who works with fantasy and romance authors on reader discoverability,” this morning’s correspondence read, mistaking me for the author of a queer medieval swordplay romantasy novel called “Daggermouth” that, I gather, involves a talking jackass. The Jane Austen-coded Ms. Bennett provided me with market analysis, and proposed putting together a “short visibility audit.” But, hey, “no pressure.”
Who says reading is dead? The machines are reading everything, all the time. “What got me wasn’t simply that you wrote about artificial intelligence,” read an e-mail I received last night from “Fanny R. Hafford” (very Richardsonian!), offering to help promote my new book, “The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State.” “It’s that you place AI within a much larger history of power, democracy, and the gradual reshaping of human life.” The book is an extended argument against replacing humans with machines. “The urgency of the argument certainly gives readers plenty to think about,” Fanny wrote. Not to mention the donkey with strong opinions.
谁说阅读已死？机器们无时无刻不在阅读一切。“打动我的不仅仅是你写了关于人工智能的内容，”昨晚我收到的一封来自“范妮·R·哈福德（Fanny R. Hafford）”（非常有理查逊风格！）的邮件写道，她提出要帮我推广我的新书《人工国家的兴衰》。“而是你把人工智能置于一个关于权力、民主以及人类生活逐步重塑的更大历史脉络之中。”这本书的核心论点恰恰是反对用机器取代人类。“这一论点的紧迫性无疑给读者留下了充分的思考空间，”范妮写道。更不用说那头有主见的驴了。
Coming soon:
Kate Atkinson has a new novel coming out tomorrow. “Our Noble Selves,” set in Britain in 1951, is about a war reporter who is implicated in the disappearance of a woman he’s been dating.
Jodi Picoult’s “Hollow Bones,” about a disaster-obsessed woman whose mother died in the 9/11 attacks, will be released on September 15th.
Gloria Steinem, the feminist activist who died last week, at the age of ninety-two, has a memoir coming out on the 22nd: “An Unexpected Life.”
P.S. MrBeast has written a book with James Patterson, and—surprise, surprise—there’s a billion-dollar-prize opportunity involved. 💰
