There’s provocative lingerie, and then there’s whatever this is.
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An Australian boutique called Rat Gizzard Oddities has gone viral for a line of women’s lingerie featuring actual taxidermied rats sewn directly onto the fabric. The brand, which has spent years crafting curiosities and oddities from preserved animals, posted the first pair to Instagram last October. The internet, predictably, lost its mind.
The creator named them LingeRATs, because of course she did. The pieces aren’t technically meant to be worn, which feels like a reasonable stance when a preserved rodent is involved, though that hasn’t stopped a vocal subset of fans from announcing their intentions to do exactly that, presumably to the horror of whoever they share a bed with.
For the skeptics who assumed the whole thing was a stunt, it’s worth noting that LingeRATs are very much purchasable. A pair will run you A$190, or about $137 USD.
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But Where Do They Get the Rats for the lingerie?
The brand has been upfront about where the rats come from, which seems like the bare minimum of transparency one should offer when selling taxidermied-animal underwear. That effort hasn’t fully shielded them from backlash, but controversy is more or less the point when your product looks like a prop from a Tim Burton film that went off the rails.
Provocative fashion has a long memory. McQueen put skulls and bones on runways and got called a genius. Victorian women wore jewelry braided from the hair of their dead. A taxidermied rat on a thong isn’t the most unhinged thing the fashion world has seen — it’s just the most recent. Whether that context makes LingeRATs more defensible or simply weirder is a personal call.
What’s less subjective is that they work as a cultural object. The Instagram post blew up, the shop got traffic, and people are still arguing about it months later. For a small Australian oddities brand, that’s a pretty crazy outcome from one very weird pair of underwear.
International shipping is available. You know, if you need it.
The post This Australian Boutique Is Selling Lingerie With Real Taxidermied Rats Sewn on the Crotch appeared first on VICE.