Nyet Boris

Helsinki City Museum has an exhibition of Soviet knickers called Memory of the Body which conjures images of Boris Yeltsin's boxer shorts and implements of female torture through the ages. The banner (above) outside is adorable since it's a pair of long underwear, but this is where the cleverness ends. The press release is hyperbole at its finest:

Helsinki City Museum is to open an exhibition, "Memory of the Body", on 4 February 2004 in Hakasalmi Villa. Produced by St Petersburg City Museum, the exhibition closes at the end of July and examines the relationship of Soviet citizens and Soviet society to the body and corporality through underwear, dating from the 1920s to the 1980s.

The "Memory of the Body" exhibition integrates contemporary art techniques with museum objects. It highlights everyday underwear and shows how a totalitarian society extended its control right down to people's skin. The exhibition introduces a new perspective of Soviet object culture. The Soviet era is not viewed from the elevated echelons of power, ideology or politics, but from the grass roots level, the perspective of ordinary people.

I was filled with disappointment when Yeltsin's shorts, the ones he was wearing while bombed and dancing on the news way back when, were not included in the exhibit. There are a lot of bras, various nighties, archive photos of Russians in bathing costumes and Lomo-esque pictures of people in their undies but, for an exhibition that had so much promise I found it lacking in creativity. An underwear exhibit could be so much fun to assemble, but this has all the fun of white cotton underwear, the ones where the waist comes up to your boobs, just like your mother used to wear. All of the tags were only in Finnish or Swedish, too, which is odd for a Museum which should expect a large number of tourists and people who don't happen to speak either of them.

I did learn that Triumph makes more than automobiles that require a live-in mechanic, they also make lingerie. I haven't shopped for a bra since the fitting clerk at Victoria's Secret yelled across the store, "Hey, Julia, do you have the wonderbra in a 34A or 34AA? In black? Do they even bother with them that small?!", when every woman in the store turned to look at me with a pity-filled smirk. So...I'm not real up on the lingerie brands. If you've got an underwear fetish, especially a Russian fetish, nirvana awaits you at the Hakasalmi Villa just north of Kiasma.