Boudoir for Now: Lingerie As Daywear by Lynn Yaeger

The spirit of Paris in the public imagination does not merely reside in the glow of the Eiffel Tower, or a mid-morning baguette at Café de Flore, or a slow ride on a bateau mouche. For hundreds of years the French capital has also been synonymous with scrumptious lingerie—the kind of teddies and tap pants soldiers on leave brought home for their sweethearts, the saucy frills sported by the naughty danseurs of the Folies Bergère.

We’ve been thinking about this lately not just because it’s finally spring—who doesn’t want something brand new and fresh and glorious next to her skin!—but also because we observed that recent runways incorporated so many boudoir references, from silky slip-tops to velvety brassieres (even Nicolas Kirkwood’s shoes were rendered in peau de soie for fall.) This isn’t merely a reprise of “underwear as outwear”—but something more subtle and sensitive. 

Does this mean that authentic lingerie now has real crossover possibilities? Where better to seek an answer than the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, where the most exquisite Gallic underwear has resided for decades, where not just your grandmother but your grandmother’s grandmother ordered her trousseau. Would a trio of wonderful Parisian shops, each with a radically different perspective but united in their worshipful relationship with lace and satin, offer merchandise ready to dance in the light of day?

At Chantal Thomass, the store itself gleaming like a giant pink-and-black boudoir stage set, a tiny scarlet satin bra echoes the one Carven suggested, to peek out from under the jacket of a demure ruby-red suit. A white satin-and-lace camisole could easily perform double duty as a blouse, taking a page from Rochas’s fall runway.

A stone’s throw away and hidden in a small courtyard, Fifi Chachnil suggests a number of articles rendered in black-on-black-polka dots, an echo, perhaps unintentional, of the sheer dottiness (the spheres were everywhere on runways) set to arrive this September. But why wait until then? An ankle-length slip in this fabric, which reminds one of the floaty dresses Bottega Veneta showed for spring, could certainly serve as a dress, especially as the temperature climbs. Chachnil also has a cami with gossamer black puffed sleeves, another hallmark of the BV runway. A shade of classic 1930s peach-pink, that odd salmon favored by Jean Harlow-esque starlets and which made frequent appearances on the spring Nina Ricci catwalk, here shows up as a luscious long-line brassiere. (If there aren’t any peau de soie Kirkwood-eque heels in evidence, at least there are hard-to-resist white satin high-heeled mules with marabou poufs.)

“Lace always evokes for me those incomparable designs which the branches and leaves of trees embroider across the sky, and I do not think that any invention of the human spirit could have a more graceful or precise origin,” the endlessly quotable Coco Chanel once declared. Could Coco have been musing aloud about Cadolle’s wonderful wares? The ultratraditional Cadolle is on the Rue Cambon, just down from Chanel’s first shop. In any case, the frothy goods include not just exquisite slips of deep pink with lace insets but, more to the point, a satin bustier that is available in almost the exact shade of burgundy that Sacai employed for fall 2011 as a silky counterpoint to its charmingly quirky interpretations of modern outerwear. That deep red, reminiscent of autumn leaves, magically imparts an air of propriety that crisper days will demand.