Chukka Panties
Woman's Own / 20th June 1969
“You wear ’em. Then you chuck ’em away.” Hmm. I had heard that disposable knickers were available in the ’60s, and the reference that this ad makes to ‘some chuckaway panties’ hints that this was quite a fashionable thing back then, if not totally reliable. The 80% rayon that these are made of may well have prevented the pants from disintegrating, but I’d put money on them causing a fair amount of sweating ‘down there’ by the end of the day, even in the middle of winter. Lovely.
Putting aside the ecological disaster that are Chukka panties, the rash claim that one size fits everyone up to 38″ hips seems unlikely when you see how tight they are on the (skinny) model. They don’t even look like they’d cover her arse when she sat down. The Advertising Archives shows that Chukkas stuck (literally, probably) around until the early 1970s at least, although they look a lot bigger in the ads on that site than they do here (apologies, by the way, for the very poor quality of the source material). A response to customer feedback, perhaps?
Tags: bad ideas, fashion, retail, social history