History is Pants
Jun. 5th, 2026 11:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ewein2412For anyone who missed the Historical Fiction Q&A with me and Sherri L. Smith the other night, Sherri’s posted an awesome recap on her “Research in the Real World” trip to Japan while she was writing The Blossom and the Firefly. You can read that here.
Like Sherri, I love to be able to see and touch artifacts that my historical characters (both fictional and real) might have seen and touched, and one of the research rabbit holes we all went diving down during our talk was inspired by the on-screen introduction of, well, panties. I showed off my collection of vintage World War II underwear.
Factory made uniform bloomers (not quite like these) in pale blue for summer and dark blue for winter were issued to the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force during the war – those who suffered to wear them called the summer version "Twilights” and the winter version “Blackouts” – also universally known as “Passion Killers”!
For a more personal touch, they could be made out of an escape map:
(The Imperial War Museum has a matching pair of panties and bra belonging to Countess Mountbatten that is just such a thing).
Sherri, seeing the maps-turned-garments, was instantly reminded of the directional codes of the “Show Way” maps that Jacqueline Woodson celebrates in her Newbery Honor book Show Way, in which generations of Woodson’s family passed down quilt patterns said to be instructions to help enslaved Americans find their way north – secret guides to freedom hidden in fabric.
Escape maps themselves are secret guides to freedom hidden in fabric. Made of silk (noiseless, waterproof, resilient), they were designed (and are still used) to help downed airmen, or escaped prisoners of war or other fugitives, find their way out of enemy territory. My favorite escape map story is how Special Operations Executive agent Krisztina Szabó was trapped at a Nazi ID checkpoint with a damning escape map in her pocket. While she waited in line, she tied the map in her hair; then flirted shamelessly with the German soldiers who checked her fake ID and waved her through without noticing that her elegant silk accessory was an Allied map!
But the amazing thing about underwear – which we started on purely out of silliness – is that in fact it’s politically important. I recalled, talking about it, how the Red Army Soviet women soldiers I wrote about in A Thousand Sisters had used underwear as a means of asserting their femininity. Issued with men’s underpants as part of their uniforms, they made their own pretty, comfortable panties out of captured German parachute silk and stolen Soviet flare parachutes (in different colors) – in fact, two female Soviet aviators were sentenced to ten years in jail for making pants out of parachutes! Both sentences were postponed because the women were so vital to the war effort. By the end of the war one of the women had been killed in action, and the other had so many medals that she was let off.
The point being that you can weave a LOT of interest, intrigue, and even tension into an item as lowly as a pair of pants!
We sent our webinar participants away with the prompt: Write a paragraph or a page about Underwear Trouble. (But keep it clean!)
If you’re interested in a more intense exploration of historical research and writing with us, do check out our October 2026 “Readers and Writers” week in Kent, England.
Like Sherri, I love to be able to see and touch artifacts that my historical characters (both fictional and real) might have seen and touched, and one of the research rabbit holes we all went diving down during our talk was inspired by the on-screen introduction of, well, panties. I showed off my collection of vintage World War II underwear.
Factory made uniform bloomers (not quite like these) in pale blue for summer and dark blue for winter were issued to the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force during the war – those who suffered to wear them called the summer version "Twilights” and the winter version “Blackouts” – also universally known as “Passion Killers”!
For a more personal touch, they could be made out of an escape map:
(The Imperial War Museum has a matching pair of panties and bra belonging to Countess Mountbatten that is just such a thing).
Sherri, seeing the maps-turned-garments, was instantly reminded of the directional codes of the “Show Way” maps that Jacqueline Woodson celebrates in her Newbery Honor book Show Way, in which generations of Woodson’s family passed down quilt patterns said to be instructions to help enslaved Americans find their way north – secret guides to freedom hidden in fabric.
Escape maps themselves are secret guides to freedom hidden in fabric. Made of silk (noiseless, waterproof, resilient), they were designed (and are still used) to help downed airmen, or escaped prisoners of war or other fugitives, find their way out of enemy territory. My favorite escape map story is how Special Operations Executive agent Krisztina Szabó was trapped at a Nazi ID checkpoint with a damning escape map in her pocket. While she waited in line, she tied the map in her hair; then flirted shamelessly with the German soldiers who checked her fake ID and waved her through without noticing that her elegant silk accessory was an Allied map!
But the amazing thing about underwear – which we started on purely out of silliness – is that in fact it’s politically important. I recalled, talking about it, how the Red Army Soviet women soldiers I wrote about in A Thousand Sisters had used underwear as a means of asserting their femininity. Issued with men’s underpants as part of their uniforms, they made their own pretty, comfortable panties out of captured German parachute silk and stolen Soviet flare parachutes (in different colors) – in fact, two female Soviet aviators were sentenced to ten years in jail for making pants out of parachutes! Both sentences were postponed because the women were so vital to the war effort. By the end of the war one of the women had been killed in action, and the other had so many medals that she was let off.
The point being that you can weave a LOT of interest, intrigue, and even tension into an item as lowly as a pair of pants!
We sent our webinar participants away with the prompt: Write a paragraph or a page about Underwear Trouble. (But keep it clean!)
If you’re interested in a more intense exploration of historical research and writing with us, do check out our October 2026 “Readers and Writers” week in Kent, England.