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Illustration by Mary Kirkpatrick
When my sister and I first spied the corset shop in Manhattan’s Lower East Side more than 30 years ago, we had no idea that we would be entering the lingerie version of Narnia. A whole new, magical world stood on the other side of that glass door. We were innocent rubes just looking for a discount price on our favourite bras.
The doorbell jangled as we entered and squinted to get our bearings. The store was dim, long and narrow. An ancient wood counter ran the length of the left side and behind that stood a bespectacled bear of a man leaning heavily on his forearms as he dispassionately observed our entrance.
Wooden shelving ran floor to ceiling on both sides of the store, buckling under hundreds of small, flat, beige cardboard boxes each labelled in black marker. “We’re looking for bras,” we told the heavyset man behind the counter. He scanned us quickly. You need “minimizers,” he declared and without a word lurched his enormous body up the wooden shelves like Spider-Man. He grabbed a box and plunked it down on the counter and pulled out the requisite bras. We took two each.
My aunt, who was with us, was equally excited and wanted one, too. “Tsk, tsk, tsk,” the owner clucked wagging his finger in her face, “You are not in their league.” He turned around and without looking pulled down another box and presented her with a different bra. “You should eat more chicken,” he admonished, “and not the organic kind.”
Yikes!
Emboldened by my success with the bras, I asked what kind of panties he had. He gazed thoughtfully at me and gruffly instructed me to turn around. A quick casing of my behind and another scrabble up the wall produced a box filled with enormous jewel-coloured panties. What had he seen about my body that these ginormous panties were the solution? At this point, we were all feeling a bit intimidated by his brusque manner, I caved and bought the panties in all four colours. We walked out of the store both feeling jubilant but also a bit “taken.” What was I going to do with these enormous panties? I now had them in emerald green, turquoise, black and cherry. But we were hooked on the experience. The combination of feeling like we had stepped back in time, the hilarious rudeness of the owner and the great deals made this my go to place on every subsequent trip to New York.
Each time I visited, I brought a different friend or family member with me. We graduated from having our butts cased for fit to actual hands-on fittings by Magda, the doyenne of undergarment fitting. A narrow path led between the counter and the shelving to a small area at the back of the store next to the bathroom that also served, once the curtain was pulled across, as a fitting room. It was here that Magda held court and the magic happened. Each time I came, I unravelled more of the history of the store. Magda was the widow of the original owner, her son was running the store now, but Magda (when not doing fittings) sat on a stool at the far end of the counter and kept an eye on him. Nothing untoward was going to happen on her watch.
Even the cursory glance of my behind occurred under Magda’s watchful eye. This was strictly a professional operation. We learned that Magda was famous for being the go-to person for young brides to build their trousseaus, for post-mastectomy women rebuilding confidence and women who need to add some spark to their sex lives.
Once when my friends joined me, Magda plucked at R’s cotton camisole and disdainfully inquired if she was married. In Magda’s world, it was inconceivable that a woman with such deficient undergarments could have gotten a man. We laughed and she came away with a sexy set of lingerie. No doubt her marriage was much improved. Magda performed her up and down of my other friend, slapped her gently on her slight muffin top and promptly instructed her to lose weight. “Oh yes, oh yes, I’m starting at the gym the minute we get home,” she replied, intimidated. In the meantime, Magda had a solution. A black suck-in corset was produced from the other side of the curtain and my friend was miraculously transformed into a sylph.
“Oh”, I said, admiring her new figure. “I want one, too,” and slipped outside of the curtain to ask Magda’s son for one.
“Tsk, tsk, tsk”, he admonished me. “That will just roll down on you.” What?! What did that even mean? How did he know? Another garment was procured from some dark recess of a top shelf and voila, the perfect reducing garment was produced. I still wear it today and true to his promise, it has never rolled down and left me in the humiliating position of having to shimmy it back up over my belly in public.
Okay, so not every visit was a sartorial success. One friend bought two bras. “Feh,” she said. “They never fit.” I have purchased as many misses as hits too. But that was hardly the point. Really it was about the experience and the step back in time. It is a place where women’s bodies were celebrated. Your age and shape didn’t matter. Everyone was treated with the same mixture of disdain and respect. And then, miraculously, a perfect garment was produced to celebrate the body that you happened to be in. I still have the giant jewel-coloured panties, which have served their purpose by providing as much comic relief as foundational support.
Marilee Sigal lives in Vancouver.