I don’t know about men, but periodically in a woman’s lifetime she will experience extreme dismay, and probably embarrassment, at the whim of her underwear. It may only be once; it may be as a child or as an adult; but it will happen at some point. No one is spared this – ever.
Often the incident involves a garment that once fit well and no longer does, whether it is because our body has changed or with wear the garment has. Another frequent cause is the just the frustration of a fabric choice turning out to be uncomfortably wrong.
I am sure they exist, but I have never met any female that actually like cotton panties. While they would be cool and more comfortable than the prettier synthetic versions, cotton seems to have a mind of its own and penchant for grabbing on to any other nearby fabric. Marketing suggests that they sell well; I just don’t know who actually chooses to wear them. As preteens I think we all suffered from poorly positioned panties sticking to our slips, skirts, slack and jeans. But one acquaintance was determined to solve this problem. Every day when she arrived at school she exchanged the comfortable nylon panties in her locker for the cotton ones provided by her mother. And every afternoon she would switch back in to her torture garment before heading home. Eventually this got just too tedious and being the adventurous sort, she eventually just didn’t bother with wearing any at all, except when at home. But my free spirited friend was a bit too comfortable it seems once we were in college. One night, while rehearsing a scene where she was to slide down a fire pole, the entire cast and crew was treated to the knowledge that she preferred to go au naturale under her skirts. She completely forgot that her short costume was missing anything to cover her well-shaped posterior as it fluttered in the breeze on her way to the ground. Till that night I had wondered if anything was capable of flustering her, but her head-to-toe blush as she froze at the bottom of the pole proved her quite human. And it was a moment I think we have all remembered to this day.
Another case of baring it all for an audience took the more common accidental tuck of a hemline in one’s panty hose a step farther than usual. Instead of merely flashing a few people as you walk by with half your butt displayed, another friend managed to bare it all before a 40th floor window. In frustration over a slip with elastic that had chosen midday to give out completely, she stood in her cubicle, back to the window, watching down the aisle to be sure no one was approaching and yanked the slip out from underneath her skirt to dispose of it. Or at least that was the plan. She had forgotten that in order to keep the slip in place earlier, she had tucked the slip into the elastic waistband of her skirt. Suddenly she was standing at her floor to ceiling window with only her sheer panty hose on from the waist down. Luckily she managed to retrieve the skirt from the floor before any colleagues could respond to her startled gasp. But she always wondered if anyone in the adjacent office building happened to be looking her direction at just the right moment.
Another time expired elastic resulted in a most unique version of the Monty Python “Silly Walks” sketch. It turned out that the colleague walking so strangely to the ladies rooms was actually holding a pair of reversed panties in place. By reversed, we mean the elastic had expired completely and the waistband had fallen to mid-thigh. Only the failing elastic in the legs and her talented thighs were keeping the apparently demised things from falling to the ground. The talented lady actually made it safely through the accounting office, past the Vice President and his secretary, and into a restroom stall to discreetly dispose of the limp remains.
Are you are noticing a theme here? The real culprit is elastic. We are no longer in the days of lacing up garments or tying them around us to keep them in place. But in either an effort to conserve spending, or more likely just distaste for shopping for underwear, we tend to forget that the elastic we depend on so much actually does have a shorter lifetime than ourselves and it can disintegrate without warning. And to that end those who wear the more supportive undergarments, such as Spanx, need to bear this last anecdote in mind, and not wear them till they give out.
Having recently lost considerable weight, discovering that the previously supportive underwear now was loose was considered a pleasant discovery and once dressed, was paid no more mind. A few hours later, however, it felt as though the garment was mysteriously even looser, though still fitting snugly in the crucial waist and leg openings. Knowing there had not been a noticeable loss of girth in the course of sitting at a desk for part of a morning, there was cause to wonder if this had just gone unnoticed while dressing (being less than completely awake), or if it was just an exaggerated comparison to memory. Eventually, however, the morning coffee took its toll and we were off to the restroom. The garment did indeed feel a bit lose, if not limp, as I walked down the hall, but the discovery upon raising my skirt in the stall explained it all. When elastic finally gives up the ghost, it literally disintegrates, leaving little grains of the “rubber” dropping from the threads it once encased. Do you have any idea how much of this is in elasticized fabric? A shower of tiny latex beads was pilling from my panties and collecting on the inside of the skirt and inside the panties. I soon witnessed what looked like the world’s worst case of flakey skin or dandruff, except that it actually bounced before accumulating on the floor. Solution? There was a serious temptation to follow the example in the first anecdote and toss the mess in the trash; my skirt being long enough to have no risk of reprising Marilyn Monroe’s ventilation grate scene. But that still seemed a bit too risqué for the office. So rather than risk this continuing and an unplanned public release, a brisk rubbing of pilling fabric to pilling fabric was done over paper towels to dispose of as much “latex snow” as possible while still having undergarments to finish the day. Such an “amusing” start to the work week.