I see London, I see France

Eleri Lynn, a fashion curator at the V&A, wrote a book about the museum's massive underwear collection titled "Underwear: Fashion in Detail." If you have a second, watch this short video in which she gives a brief, but fascinating, history of shapewear from Victorian corsets to lycra bodysuits.

"It's now very difficult to trace the fashionable body shape through underwear as historians would have done previously. Of course we now have Spanx which is a form of corsetry using Lycra instead of whalebone but today you are supposed to be the shape through diet and exercise." Eleri Lynn

Caroline