All that underpins

Seamstress designs custom lingerie for all


In the market for a custom-made bra or corset?

Leslie Menagh, owner of Underpinnings, a Peterborough, Ontario, lingerie shop, can help.

“I’ve sewed my whole life and have a background in corset making and had really loved making custom corsets for people,” says Menagh, who graduated from Nova Scotia’s College of Art and Design before moving to Peterborough.

“I studied bathing-suit and bra construction. I had all these skills; it made sense to create my own work,” she says, while remembering with frustration her teenaged struggle to find the perfect bra.

“My mom could tell several stories of attempts to take me shopping. I would end up sobbing. I couldn’t find the right thing.”

Shopping at Underpinnings is the opposite experience. Menagh invites clients to come to her cottage-style studio, nestled beside Peterborough’s Jackson Park, for a custom fitting and a conversation about design.

“It’s a really intimate process where inevitably, you share things about yourself,” she says. “Hopefully, by and large, people feel better about themselves. They’ve done something nice for themselves. We’ve talked about their body. It’s very validating. It feels like a healing process. It’s a really personal, kind of self-celebratory experience.”

Menagh says she was first intrigued by the complicated history of the corset while she was an art student.

“Organ displacement, discomfort — it’s laden with that history,” she says. “It’s also about the way it makes a person feel, how sensual it makes them feel. I was trying to reconcile all those negative aspects, and the oppression of women and our bodies, and how it makes women feel pretty sassy and inspired, sensual, sexy and empowered.”

Corsets aren’t exclusive to women; Menagh also works with male clients looking for custom-made corsets.

She says her company’s name was inspired by the definition of the word underpinning: a system of supports, a foundation or basis for a structure.

“I had always wanted the garments I made to contain ideas or thoughts or even something written,” she says. “To be literally found on the cloth or in the pocket, so that there were thoughts, ideas, sentences or phrases contained in the garment. I’m still experimenting with that artistically.

“It’s also an architectural term. The underpinnings of a house refers to the frame, the thing that holds that structure up. Garments are also architectural. In some ways they are more complicated: they have to be flexible, they have to move with the wearer. So it was the perfect term.”

 

For more information, visit underpinnings.ca.

Read More About:
Culture, News, Fetish & Kink, Canada

Keep Reading

Six members of the Rideau Speedeaus hold a sign with the league's name on it in front of a pool

Queer sports leagues offer safety and joy

Recreational sports leagues across Canada are offering LGBTQ2S+ people something essential: the freedom to just show up and play
The cover of 'I Remember Lights'; Ben Ladouceur

‘I Remember Lights’ is a time machine trip to Montreal’s gay past

Ben Ladouceur’s rigorously researched new novel is romantic, harrowing and transportive
A black and white photo of speakers at a rally; a sign that says "Love and Let Love" hangs behind them

‘Parade’ invites us to embrace queer history to tackle the present

Noam Gonick’s new documentary turns the spotlight on Canada’s long-overlooked LGBTQ2S+ activists to tell their stories
Countess Luann holding a microphone

Countess Luann on cabaret superstardom, Kenya Moore and life after ‘The Real Housewives’

“Elegance is learned, my friends,” and the Countess’s class is in session