This Show About a Japanese Underwear Store Is the Best Series on Netflix

In Atelier, a fabric-obsessed country girl named Mayuko starts a job at Emotion, a haute couture underwear shop in Tokyo’s upscale Ginza neighborhood. There, Mayuko learns about the biz from Ms. Mayumi Nanjo, Emotion’s founder and lead designer. Mayuko calls her “the boss.” The boss is styled after Anna Wintour —€” from glossy pageboy haircut to pointy slingback heels. In any American piece of media about workplace leadership, from The Office to The Devil Wears Prada, we’d see her underlings talk shit about her for half of a thirteen episode arc. That doesn’t happen in Atelier. Mayuko unequivocally respects her tough employer.

Photo: Netflix

In the past couple of years, I’ve found myself devoted to a handful of Korean and Japanese dramas that have become crossover hits in the United States and Latin America. Like any red-blooded American, I love watching hot people in soft lighting use tiny cell phones. But what I love most about dramas from east Asia is how distinctly foreign they feel to me as an American girl roughly the same age as most of their protagonists. Geum Jan Di of K-Drama hit Boys Over Flowers may be headstrong like I was as a teenager, but she works hard on behalf of her parents above all else. The same thread runs through Atelier. The show is polite and deferential to its elders, concepts that I’ve never seen executed without some sinister motive on TV here.

In a lot of senses, I’m like Mayuko. I don’t work in fashion, but I am a Midwesterner who is trying to make money as a writer in New York City. I’m not a native, and I’m certainly not as refined many people in the same industry. Unlike Mayuko, some of the things I’ve said about my bosses are too unspeakable to even allude to here. At one point, Mayuko apologizes to her boss for being late to the dress rehearsal of a fashion show after hitting her head and going into a coma. If I fell into a coma on the job, I’d probably tweet about it and then immediately pursue legal options. I complain a lot, and I’ve gotten drunk with co-workers too many times. Mayuko would never deign to do either. Atelier is primarily a show about taste — what it means, who doesn’t have it — and my American proclivities are vulgar.

That’s the particular charm of J-Dramas like this one. They’re intense, but there’s no bad-mouthing, no nudity, no violence, no drugs, and no rock and roll (Atelier‘s Lite FM-style credits theme is almost unlistenable). At one point, the viewer thinks there might be sex between Mayuko and her intern, but the entire romantic arc ends in a short series of text messages about believing in each other’s business acumen and fabric dye-ing abilities. The world built in Atelier is minuscule and complicated, mostly concerned with whether or not the lingerie business should expand into a mass-produced second line. There’s a lot of paperwork. But despite all those knocks against it, I stayed hooked.

Photo: Netflix

Some elements of Atelier were deeply confusing to me, American or not. The final three episodes, in which we discover Nanjo has a son that she gave up for Emotion, seem at once drawn out and tacked on. A Carolina Herrera salesperson becomes integral to Emotion’s success after an already-successful runway show. Mayuko is repeatedly called frumpy and classless, even though she’s gorgeous and passionate. Japan’s hottest fictional fashion magazine Conscious devotes an entire issue to a single brand. There’s some dialogue about spending time with a pet cat that appeared to be sexually suggestive and wholly elusive to me. Emotion’s famed lingerie was just meh. Mayuko’s own line of jersey-cotton camisole and boyshort lingerie-hybrids is downright ugly.

Atelier is sometimes boring, but it’s a treat to watch a workplace show without malice or a mean spirit. Ultimately, the series empowers its viewers to understand that what others cannot see (like our Underwear, which is the Japanese title for Atelier) is the actual, truest reflection of a person. Fans of sports bras and bustiers alike will enjoy the gentle support of its primary message.

Claire Carusillo is a freelance writer in Brooklyn.

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Pregnant Mom on Posing Nude: ‘When I Looked in the Mirror, I Liked What I Saw’

I love to wear cleavage-baring dresses and I host burlesque shows, so it may seem like I’m very comfortable with my body. And I am — but only the top half. I come from a long line of what my mother euphemistically calls “big-boned women” (though I’m pretty sure bones aren’t supposed to jiggle so much). While I came to love my big breasts, try as I might, I have never been able to embrace my big thighs, butt, and belly. Even at my thinnest, I tried to conceal those body parts by avoiding pants (I currently don’t own one pair) and wearing floor-length skirts. And at my heaviest, as antifeminist and self-hating as it may sound, those areas are even deader to me.

All that changed when I was pregnant. I realize many mothers-to-be hate the experience of their bodies effectively becoming incubators, completely transforming to serve the needs of their growing baby. But when I looked in the mirror, I actually liked what I saw. For the first time, I didn’t view my bigness as a chronic flaw; it had a purpose. As my stomach swelled, a beauty permeated my curves and assuaged my own self-judgment. Although I had posed for a few artsy, topless photo shoots in the past, I always refused to go completely nude. But I knew I wanted to capture my pregnant body in its entirety (albeit with a bit of strategic drapery). This was long after Demi Moore sparked the posing-nude-while-pregnant craze with her 1991 Vanity Fair cover, so it wasn’t exactly taboo-breaking. But, unlike Moore and her expecting celebrity imitators, I wasn’t starting with a “perfect” figure. And, interestingly, that actually made me a lot less self-conscious than usual.

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“Like a lot of women, I always felt like my body was on display for either attention or criticism — whether that feeling was coming from me or from society at large,” Emily Schwartz, a mother of two from Houston, tells Yahoo Parenting. She posed nude for the first time when she was expecting her first child after a local photographer invited her to be part of a series he was shooting — something she never would have normally considered. “When I was pregnant, I felt like I suddenly stepped out of that realm of objectification,” she says. “I no longer worried about how big my thighs were. My body was just something really beautiful. It was sort of a revelation.”

STORY: ‘I’m Not Perfect’: Country Star Posts Photo of Belly 6 Weeks After Giving Birth

Ivy, a New York City mother of one, also posed nude in a boudoir shoot when she was pregnant after suddenly feeling very sexy. “I wore heels and lingerie, which isn’t something you often see,” she tells Yahoo Parenting. “Usually it’s this idealization of the pregnant mother as the Madonna, but of course the way you get pregnant is not by being virginal! We have one of the pictures up in our bedroom and it’s one of my favorite photos of me. Sometimes visitors see it and say, ‘Is that you? Wow, that’s a really sexy picture. I have never thought of pregnant women as sexy before, but now I will!’”

In the age of smartphone cameras, it’s not surprising that many moms who pose nude while pregnant do so at home with their partners. But I opted for something more formal, enlisting a longtime friend who’s a professional photographer to shoot me in a studio. Initially I was apprehensive about taking it all off, so we warmed up with some clothed and topless shots. But as I became more exposed, my confidence rose. (It helped that the photographer appreciates full-figured females and vocalized his support.) He showed me a few of the images as we went along, and while I still saw that I was overweight, my focus was on how radiant and, more importantly, happy and comfortable I looked.

And yet I’m well aware that for women, body shaming is prevalent at all times, especially during pregnancy. That’s fueled in large part by Instagram, where women document their burgeoning bumps (often in the nude) and society weighs in about whether they’re too fat or too skinny. Then postpartum, there’s a cultural expectation that mom will bounce back to her prepregnancy weight within weeks.

However, for me, living as an overweight person for much of my life seemed to squash the insecurity many pregnant women feel when their body starts to balloon.

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