Under where?

“You can smell the underwear,” said textile curator Linda McShannock as she opened the door to the nation’s largest museum collection of panties, girdles, brassieres, and other unmentionables. We were two stories underground, deep in the heart of the Minnesota Historical Society, where the real rubber waistbands are slowly disintegrating. More than 3,500 historically significant undergarments are carefully stored in this high-security vault. The temperature is a constant 65 degrees, and sodium vapor light insures that no ultraviolet rays will damage these priceless pieces. Bust pads, boxers, petticoats, corset covers, and of course, hoops and tournures for that 19th-century wide-load look—they are all stored in these lockers, which are funded by the National Endowment of the Humanities. Of the Historical Society’s 40,000 square feet of storage, a substantial portion is taken up by underpants. The collection is not currently open to the public, but next summer it will replace the “Up North” display for the letter U in the permanent “Minnesota A to Z” exhibit.

“Munsingwear was as visible in Minneapolis as milling,” said McShannock, by way of explanation. If not for the booming flour business, our city might have been known as the underwear capital of the world. When Munsingwear downsized and moved out of state in 1979, the motherlode of museum collections was bestowed upon the MHS.

“It’s my favorite subject,” confessed McShannock. After getting a degree from the University of Minnesota in fashion merchandising, she volunteered at the MHS and spent months cataloging 900 bras and girdles—a mere fraction of the Munsingwear collection. She dated them, photographed them, wrote descriptions, and put it all in a searchable database. Her meticulous work is now used by underwear researchers across the country.

McShannock opened one drawer to show a masochistic corset stiffened with whale bone, and she pointed out how women were literally constrained by underwear. Put under too much pressure, these bones could splinter with painful results, at least until steel-reinforced corsets were developed. Enter underwear revolutionary Amelia Jenks Bloomer who pushed for female freedom in the 1850s. (Her famous “bloomers” are not to be confused with knock-offs like knickers—short for “knickerbockers,” or copycat “scimp scamp” underpants.) The mutiny against the petticoat and other vagaries seemed unstoppable in the 1870s.

Some of these innovations left skeptics sour. Gustav Jaeger ranted that “only animal fibres prevented the retention of the ‘noxious exhalations’ of the body, retained the salutary emanations of the body which induce a sense of vigour and sound health and ensured warmth and ventilation.” In other words, Jaeger was arguing for wool. George D. Munsing, on the other hand, saw an opening. By plating silk over wool, the silkiness of the garment touched the skin, while the garment retained its woolen warmth. Munsing’s famous “itchless underwear” was all the rage and helped keep to a minimum the embarrassing scratching incidents.

Minneapolis was a special challenge, of course, since warm underwear meant the difference between life and death in the frigid winter. Munsing saw real opportunity for a volume business, and he marketed his famous scarlet union suit in the 1890s. By 1917, Munsingwear produced 30,000 undergarments a day, and one-tenth of the nation’s union suits. The company did more than just free women from the confines of corsets. During the 1920s, it was the largest employer of women in Minneapolis and the largest underwear producer in the country. To celebrate their success and show their patriotic fervor after V-Day, Munsingwear even produced a prototype American flag bra and girdle in 1946—a racy treasure that is jealously guarded by McShannock.