Latex corsets

Swan song of the thong;
The once-hot garment is falling from favour
In the glory days of the thong, Monica Lewinsky is said to have kick-started her affair with Bill Clinton by showing him hers.
Yet now that silky strip of fabric worn between one's nether cheeks - its telling "whale tail" invariably peeking from the tops of jeans - seems to be  hot no more.
Just a week before Valentines Day, thongs are playing only a bit part in retail lingerie displays, having ceded space to lacy boy shorts, culottes and frilly full-torso outfits. In an online contest  to determine "the best bottom in the world," photos of behinds in bikini panties and boy shorts dominate.
This month, Cosmopolitan, the women's magazine once responsible for popularizing the thong, declared the g-stringy garment as predictable as the celebrity sex tape.
For many women, the reaction will surely be, "Good riddance." As our mothers and grandmothers knew, the secret to sexiness is often showing less skin, not more.
But maybe it isn't our lingerie that's the problem - it's our endless attempts to narrowly define sex appeal. There are as many ideas of what's sexy as there are humans on Earth.
That is made clear in The Other Side of Desire: Four Journeys Into the Far Realms of Lust and Longing, a book that investigates the extreme margins of sexual attraction. Its author, Daniel Bergner, interviewed a foot fetishist, a dominatrix, a man fixated on his 12-year-old stepdaughter and a man who loves amputees, illuminating their inner struggles. The book blurred the lines between sexual idiosyncrasy and deviance.
If our culture typically shuns such diversity, it isn't because we consider fetishes taboo. We're just obsessed with creating the perfect one.
Consider the bikini. When it was born in Paris in 1946, no French model would agree to wear it. In the U.S., Modern Girl magazine declared "the so-called bikini" so offensive that "it is inconceivable that any girl with tact and decency would ever wear such a thing."
Yet the two-piece swimsuit became ubiquitous. There were songs about itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny yellow polka-dot ones. To indicate pulchritude in a newspaper cartoon, a loose sketch of a bikinied girl sufficed.
Because it was everywhere, it became a cliche - SexyTM. Eventually, the bikini simply wasn't shocking anymore, and the thong stepped in. Like the bikini, the thong was first popular on the beaches of Europe and Brazil. Then came the late 1990s: Gucci models wore them on the catwalk, and all of a sudden they were everywhere. Straps winked at you from the paunchy midriff of your next-door neighbour. Sisqo sang "The Thong Song."
But, like the bikini, the thong was more of an item one aspired to wear than something you wore regularly. "Maybe in a month, after I do some more crunches," you'd think.
"For thongs, you really have to have a good bum," says Anita Dimitrijevic, owner of Di Moda, a Forest Hill lingerie shop. "You have to have a nice body. When you see a thong on the model, you might think it looks good. But it's different when you go in the changeroom."
Thongs flew in the face of the wisdom that, when it comes to what is sexy, more is usually more. In a more classic age, expensive underwear gently shaped and supported the body, creating knockout figures beneath evening gowns.
The garment's perma-wedgie was also decried as uncomfortable and impractical. It forced a time-consuming regimen of waxing, shaving and general lady-scaping. It was a corset for a new Victorian age: a "sexy" item that, on a desert island without men, no woman would voluntarily wear. To some, the thing was a pre-feminist throwback.
"Thong sales never beat bikinis, shorts or briefs!" says Jennifer Klein, owner of Toronto lingerie shop Secrets From Your Sister. The store offers "thong 101" training to help show women how to best wear a thong, perhaps in a nod to complaints about discomfort.
If one has to take a course to wear lingerie, however, maybe it's a sign that not all sexy fads - whether they are miniskirts, low-rise jeans, cone bras, lipstick, garters and stockings, stilettos, Latex HotPants, leather chaps, babydoll dresses or mesh anything - are ever one-size-fits-all.
This was parodied pitch-perfectly by Borat, whose publicity photos for his eponymous 2006 movie featured him, mustachioed and hirsute, in an electric green, V-shaped thong swimsuit wedged deeper than decency allows.
Perhaps that was the thong's death knell. Now, with the popularity of Mad Men-shaped silhouettes and high- and mid-waist trousers and skirts for women, retailers report sales of fuller underwear are back up.
Of course, thongs should still be worn by any woman - or man - who loves them. Everyone should wear what turns him or her on, as far as legal guidelines permit. We should have licence to factor in our own personalities, and those of the people we want to attract.
Which one suspects is what most of us have intuitively done all along.