Red Lingerie History: From Flannel Petticoats to Seduction

Red lingerie has meant three different things in about 150 years. In the Victorian era it was mostly warm wool, a scarlet flannel petticoat or a red-trimmed corset, worn for practical reasons and treated with some suspicion. After the Second World War it became a flash of holiday color under a dark dress. Since the 1960s it has been the shorthand color of seduction, the one sold hardest at Valentine's Day.

Madder, cochineal and an 1868 laboratory

For most of history a good red was expensive. Madder root, Rubia tinctorum, had been grown as a dyestuff since at least 1500 BC, and Ottoman dyers turned it into Turkey red, a cotton red that did not fade in light or in the wash. The method reached Europe in the 1740s, and in 1785 the first Scottish Turkey red works opened at Dalmarnock, near Glasgow. The other great red was cochineal, a dye made from scale insects that Spain shipped from Mexico from the 1520s onward. It colored cardinals' robes and the coats of English officers.

Chemistry changed the price. In 1868 Carl Graebe and Carl Liebermann, working with BASF, found a way to make alizarin, the coloring matter of madder, from anthracene, a coal-tar product. William Perkin reached the same result independently, and the German group filed its patent one day ahead of him in 1869. Synthetic alizarin cost a fraction of the root, and the madder market collapsed almost overnight. Red cloth for underthings was now cheap.

Scarlet flannel under a Victorian skirt

Victorian underwear was white by default. White could be boiled, and it signaled virtue. Color next to the body read as fast. Vanity Fair warned its readers in 1875 not to imitate "those who love" colored corsets, and an 1858 travel writer called bright red underskirts "flaunting" and "coquettish."

Practical women wore red anyway. Godey's Lady's Book reported in 1870 that some women who had objected to red corsets now preferred them because they "do not show soil." The petticoat was where red was most at home. The V&A holds a mid-calf petticoat of scarlet flannel wool made in England around 1890, pleated onto a red canvas waistband stamped "The National Skirt Band," with three tucked flounces at the knee. In Wales, red and red-and-black flannels were woven for women's petticoats as part of national dress; Museum Wales describes flannel as "warm, hardwearing and easy to brush clean," the fabric of choice for working women.

Wool next to the skin also carried a medical reputation. In 1904, when a physician called flannel underclothing "injurious to health," a young P. G. Wodehouse wrote comic verse for the Daily Chronicle about having been taught to "always wear flannel next your skin."

Christmas red and the Merry Widow

The 1950s made red a fashion color for foundations. Under the full skirts of the New Look, a red slip or girdle was meant to be glimpsed. A 1954 advertisement for Luxite promised "gay, brilliant, beautiful red for a saucy glimpse" under a dark hem, and Good Housekeeping reported in 1956 that red had reached bras, girdles and lingerie in shades from torero red to baby pink. Women's Wear Daily sold the color seasonally: "Christmas red" foundations in a 1952 advertisement, and a November 1957 story headlined "Red Bras Sell."

Warner's black Merry Widow corselet of about 1953 carried red satin waist tape and red suspender flashes, and in 1960 the company introduced a shade it called "red pepper." The color stayed a minority taste. In 1959 an unnamed foundations buyer complained to WWD that the white-only pattern was "an American national disease."

How red lingerie became the color of seduction

The Underpinnings Museum, which mounted the online exhibition Incendiary: A History of Red Lingerie in 2022, dates the color's modern meaning to the decades after the 1960s, when red underwear came to be sold as "red-hot" and "smouldering." Women's magazines framed it as a tool for pleasing men. Cosmopolitan in 1982 advised readers to "make an impact" with "gorgeous red underwear," and in 1992 the same magazine carried a Victoria's Secret advertisement for a red satin chemise.

London's Agent Provocateur, founded in 1994, sold the boudoir version: red satin overbust corsets with black lace and suspenders. Serena Rees said in a 1996 interview that colors were its best sellers because they were hard to find elsewhere. The pairing of black and red, first pushed in the 1950s, became the house style of a whole category.

Valentine's Day and the Lunar New Year

Red now has two sales peaks a year, and they rest on different beliefs. In the West it is the Valentine's Day color, bought as a gift. A January 2025 analysis by Grips Intelligence of 28 US lingerie sites found that sales on many of them peaked near February 7 in 2024, driven by gift-buyers, most of them men.

In Chinese communities red is worn for luck, especially in a person's own zodiac year, benmingnian, which is thought to bring misfortune. In January 2006 the Associated Press reported that a Kuala Lumpur department store was selling red briefs printed with gold characters at prices ending in the lucky 88, and that they made up three of every ten boxes of underwear it sold daily before the Year of the Dog. In February 2021 JD.com said searches for red underwear on its site had risen 750% since its New Year sales began, with people born in the Year of the Ox the expected buyers. (Red underwear at the Western New Year, in Italy and Spain, is a separate custom with its own history.) The color that Victorian magazines warned against is now, for millions of buyers, the safe choice: the red they are told to wear.

Last updated October 28, 2026

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