Bridget Brown doesn’t have strong feelings about panty hose. But a few years ago the title “A History of Panty Hose in America” popped into her head and wouldn’t leave. “I guess I thought it had potential,” says the Madison-based graphic designer and fiction writer. “A lot of my stuff comes from the title or a first line that I wasn’t able to let go of until I followed it to its absurd outcome.”
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In this case, the title led Brown to put an ad in Poets & Writers in 1997 soliciting short-short stories and essays on hosiery, which led to the publication of The History of Panty Hose in America in June of last year. She designed the book to look like a package of upscale panty hose, complete with a notch at the top and a sizing grid on the back; the stories are printed on thin pieces of cardboard inside. Most deal with the nylons issue by focusing on the women who wear them.
“It’s so easy to copy this stuff, and so easy to change it,” she says. “It was amazing how differently people were reading it; it’d be on Jewish Web sites, the Catholic Information Network Web site, and on the atheist Web site.
–Cara Jepsen
