You open the dresser drawer and your eyes stop on a single folded pair of panties. A bra left on top of the washing machine in the changing room. A group of undergarments hung out to dry. The instant these monopolise sexual attention, the person notices: this is a reaction to the underwear itself, not to dress. A typical form of the displacement structure of fetishism, where desire turns toward the existence of the fabric rather than bare skin or genitals.

Underwear fetish is the umbrella term for strong arousal at women’s underwear itself, bras, panties, lingerie, stockings, or at the figure wearing it. It is one of the classic categories of fetishism research, discussed as a typical case in which the centre of the sexual object displaces from the genitals or whole body to a particular object or part.

As a type of fetishism

Medically and psychologically, underwear fetish occupies a middle position between partialism and fetishism. Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis (1886) already recorded obsessive attachment to women’s underwear as a case, and Freud’s Fetishism (1927) took it up as well. The standard account treats it as a “slipping” of the object of arousal from the body’s centre (genitals, whole body) toward its periphery (underwear, feet, hair, material). Underwear fetish is especially high in frequency among these slippages and is widely observed regardless of culture.

The distinctiveness of Japanese underwear-fetish culture

The Japanese underwear fetish is continuous with the Western lingerie fetish yet has developed its own fine sub-divisions. Where the Western lingerie fetish is organised around “decorative, alluring underwear” (lace, garters, corsets), Japan has formed its own categories around a taste for “plain, functional underwear.”

Specifically: white cotton panties (shiropan); striped panties; school garments such as school swimsuits and bloomers; pantyhose and stockings; and uniform-designated underwear worn under uniforms. These have no counterpart in the Western lingerie fetish and developed through the representations of Japanese school culture, girls’ manga, anime, and adult manga. Reasons cited include that the Japanese women’s-underwear market has kept functional underwear and lingerie relatively distinct; that the glimpse of underwear was standardised in manga and anime as a visual sign; and that uniform culture built its own symbolic system of “uniform plus underwear” set-pieces.

Typical sub-categories

The lingerie line is the taste for decorative high-end underwear, directly tied to the Western lingerie fetish; lace, satin, see-through, and garter sets are the objects, appealing through active allure. The shimapan and shiropan line is the taste for plain, everyday underwear, genre-ified in linkage with the panchira expression of boys’ and girls’ manga. The pantyhose and stockings line is the taste for sheer leg-covering material, an extension of legwear often discussed as an adjacent area. The school-swimsuit, bloomer, and gym-wear line is the taste for school garments, a uniquely Japanese category whose object shifts by generation (bloomers up to the 1980s, spats and half-pants from the 1990s). The no-panties and no-bra line is the taste for the absence of underwear, the apparent inverse but within the same visual sign-system of attention to “the missing of what should be there.”

Reception as expression

Underwear fetish is a standard genre handled repeatedly in commercial pornography, chakuero, and gravure. The paradox that an underwear figure is more arousing than full nudity has been restated since mid-twentieth-century pinup culture. Reasons cited: fabric in its proper place creates a temporal anticipation of “about to be removed”; the sag and bite of fabric accentuate the body’s relief; and underwear is the costume of private space, so viewing it generates a pseudo-intimacy of sharing a “special scene.” The panchira expression of manga and anime narrativised the sign-structure of underwear fetish by building in the “accidentality” of a viewpoint character glimpsing underwear by chance, a distinctively Japanese visual rhetoric rarely seen in Western graphic novels.

The collection of real underwear and its boundary

Part of underwear fetish turns from viewing to possessing real underwear. This divides into legal routes (receiving from a partner, buying new, second-hand purchase) and the illegal route of stealing from another’s washing line or locker. The last is theft, and with trespass also constitutes housebreaking; underwear theft persists as a social problem often discussed as the pathological side of the fetish. The market for second-hand underwear obtained through legal routes (colloquially burusera) has generated a separate discussion and is a subject of historical and sociological study.

See also

• Lingerie
• Shimapan
• Pantyhose
• Stockings
• No-Panties
• No-Bra
• Panchira
• Chakuero