Vaquera’s Panty Skirt Turns Heads

Writer Nicolaia Rips skirted responsibility in SSENSE’s most scandalous skirt for two weeks straight. Here’s what she learned.

Often, on the MTA, I will encounter somebody wearing an outfit so detached from common sense, an outfit that operates by its own set of rules the likes of which are incomprehensible to most, that it could only ever exist in New York. “That’s different. That’s new,” I think, inspecting the person from across the subway car. For two weeks, that person was me.

In VAQUERA’s SS18 press release, the notes for the collection were simple but forward: “Surprise, bitch!” The brand, currently designed by Patric DiCaprio and Bryn Taubensee and backed by Dover Street Market, is high-velocity—a subway car hurtling toward Bushwick, a camouflage gown, a cone bra over a polo, loved by the likes of Solange, Julia Fox, and Doja Cat.The VAQUERA Panty Skirt continues the mission decided in those collection notes. The wool/poly-blend pencil skirt hits at a flattering mid-calf. In the back a slit slides up the thigh. On the front, of course, is a massive pair of frilly prissy satin baby-pink underwear, held in place by three points: the sides and the bottom of the crotch. On the underwear is a bow. As the underwear are not flush to the skirt, there is a slight bulge to the panty. And then, what’s that, in the back? Surprise, bitch! It’s a thong! Every day for two weeks I wore this skirt. To quote Sisqó, “Girl I know you wanna show da na da na/That thong thong thong thong.”

In the skirt my once anodyne life developed an arrhythmia. Wake up, don the skirt. All hours I considered the skirt, remembered what the skirt did for me, and what I could do for it. What new pleasures and humiliations would the skirt offer tomorrow? Torrential downpour in the skirt. Citi Bike in the skirt. Sex in the skirt (take off underwear to put on more underwear). Sob in the skirt. Get a dental cleaning in the skirt. No cavities in the skirt. Lose at trivia in the skirt. Do I go commando in the skirt? Can people see my panty lines? If a tree falls—if the skirt is only worn inside my apartment. . . Sitting on my couch wearing the skirt, no socks, and a sports bra, I think of Maggie Gyllenhaal in the movie : “I like dull work.”As I walked down the street men would simper at me, Looney Tunes style, like , eyes belching out of their face. On Canal Street a vendor said, “Hey! Nice dress.” So close! I FaceTimed my mom and she laughed so hard she dropped her phone. Then she tried to sneakily take a screenshot, the traitor, but since she’s in her 60s there was a loud click. As I shopped for groceries a man pointed at my crotch, “This is. . . for TV?” To him the only conceivable option was that I was filming a hidden-camera prank show. We both looked around for cameras. On my way to my father’s seventieth birthday dinner I walked by the portal to Dublin, to let the Irish see my skirt. I had disturbed visions of using the panties as a BabyBjörn, putting a stuffed bear through the leg holes. Julio Torres of told me I should sew them up and use it as a pocket. Alex Hartman of @NolitaDirtbag said even he couldn’t make fun of me. ’s Jess Nieses advised me to pair it with a tiny little nothing top or even just a bra.

On my first outings I skirted responsibility. I confess, I was a wuss and a prude. At ’s gala at the Morgan Library I wore the skirt sideways, pink pockets protruding on my hips like peplum. But panties on the hip are still panties. At Delia Cai’s “Hate Read” at the River I opted for a knee-length Yohji Yamamoto top over it, taking the skirt from avant-garde to Amish. Every day I moodily checked the weather—sunshine, again. The weeks drooped, like the satin pink underwear affixed to the front of my groin. I had endless styling breakdowns. Who would I be that day? Literal, serious, or sexy? It was always a surprise, bitch. There is nothing more creative than constraint; imagination leaks out the sides of any box. I ventured into my closest like it was Narnia. There were delusions, like maybe trapped under my shoes is a belt that will make it all make sense. But by the time the Met Gala after-parties started I said, “Buck up, Rips.” For $30 I got my hair flat-ironed in Chinatown, the first time since my middle school bat mitzvah circuit. I was ready to put on my big girl panties now.Office siren, officecore, corpcore, corporate fetish: many names for the newest fashion trend, a sleek revamp of Y2K business casual. Think Gisele Bündchen in rectangular glasses. Business casual, though, is a style of dressing plagued by ambiguity, defined by a collection of denials. No jeans, no short skirts, no shorts. Personally, I’ve never been casual about anything in my life, and I’m not going to start now.The VAQUERA Panty Skirt is not office siren, nor corporate fetish. Instead, it is office party. It is business burlesque. Gisele would not wear this skirt but Dolly Parton in “9 to 5” might pull it off the rack, and Parker Posey in would definitely wear it to the library. Compared to the stylized world of officecore, office party depicts what having a creative job is really like. The office can literally be a party. Networking happens at the club, the water cooler dispenses dirty martinis. There is no anticipating what job opportunities you may encounter on a night out. As a creative, you work how you play.Underwear as outerwear has an involved history as exploration of the taboo. Madonna’s Gaultier cone bra from Blonde Ambition. Tom Ford’s whale-tale inspired dresses. Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun’s portrait of Marie Antoinette in a chemise. Flappers in dresses inspired by teddies. Frilly bloomers and boxers-as-shorts on TikTok. Trompe l’oeil nudie dresses. Australian architect Bianca Censori’s “no pants.” Then there is the fifteenth-century European codpiece. The codpiece is a triangular swath of material fixed by a button or tie to the front of a man’s crotch. By the sixteenth century, codpiece trends moved toward indulgence: The buggers were bejeweled, crafted in velvet or silk, tasseled and embroidered. Sometimes the nobility used them as storage for hankies and other knickknacks. Initially created to preserve modesty, the codpiece became a generous ode to the male member.

I found myself explaining my outfit choice to anybody who looked my way. Then I stopped. Nobody deserved an explanation, except perhaps my father, whose seventieth birthday I unequivocally altered the energy at. When you wear something unconventional, people assume you are very confident so you must be confident. I was more confident crossing the street; I almost got hit several times. I was more confident at parties. For something so brazen, the skirt is remarkably sexless. A pencil skirt has a prudish appeal; it is thrillingly anonymous and discrete. A thong is shameless. The hybrid is outrageous, a spectacle of sexuality. It issues a challenge to the onlooker. Oh, you want to know what’s under my skirt? Well here it is, buddy!At the Moma PS1 party I rode high. I was showered with compliments. I ate a mango. I had no inhibition, #YOLO. Come midnight I scampered back to my boyfriend’s apartment. This was my big mistake. The next morning I embarked on the trek from Bed-Stuy to my apartment in Manhattan, the most shameful walk of shame in my life. “I’ll see you around?” I said nervously to my boyfriend of a year and a half before zipping up the side of my skirt and slipping on last night’s hideously uncomfortable but très chic shoes. As I hobbled to the subway, finding a smidge of comfort in wearing shoes folded down as a mule, I passed a group of elderly men sitting on their stoop, enjoying the 80-degree weather. There they were and there I was, wild-eyed miscreant limping towards them, shirt stained with coffee and a Day-Glo lump of my 1 AM fake cheese quesadilla, sweating in a wool skirt, pink thong jutting out lustily, as if I had decided to go method before my community theater audition for . If they didn’t laugh, they might’ve screamed. Wearing the VAQUERA Panty Skirt I experienced the breadth of the human experience: the lightness of forgetting I had a body, the shame of remembering, and finally the ecstasy and discomfort of being completely present.

At the train I hustled to get a seat so I could put my bag on my lap. A tall bald man in a pastel green button-down started screaming about the Knicks, attempting to whisk fellow passengers into the rousing chant of, “Go New York. Go New York. Go!” The woman next to me turned and said snarkily, referring to him, “Never seen that before.” She picked the wrong ally. Moved by a sudden whim of kinship to that noble man creating New York spirit in his horrible shirt, I stood up, unfurling my skirt in solidarity and thought, “Surprise, bitch.”