Then in the 1970s, Gorin-Paracka says, “The Austrian designer Rudi Gernreich popularized the thong for both men and women with his 1974 thong.” One of the thongs is now part of the Costume Institute at the Met Museum's permanent collection. McKnight says that thongs remained a garment for salacious stage performances and images until the thong bikini of the late 1960s, when it entered modern style as beachwear. “Non-professionals wore them for costumes or naughty private play, but generally not as underwear until Frederick's of Hollywood began to make a more wearable version of them available as underwear through their catalogs and stores.” The G-string, which was often sequined and rhinestoned, was “a cultural marker of glamourous erotic entertainment,” says Jo Weldon, a burlesque historian and author of The Burlesque Handbook. “They were first made commercially available in the late 1930s by Charles Guylette in New York, who sold exclusively to burlesque performers,” adds Gorin-Paracka.

However, when it comes to seeing the G-string as a sexualized or fetishized object in Western culture, Gorin-Paracka says we should actually credit a conservative figure for its emergence into popular culture as it was “the mayor of New York City in the 1930s, Fiorello La Guardia, demanded that the city's nude dancers cover themselves out of respect to the multitude of visitors making their way to the 1939 World's Fair, an origin story that's repeated in every history of the garment.” Leading up to the 1930s, G-strings became a way for strippers and burlesque dancers to show as much skin as possible without embracing total nudity, a requirement for modesty laws, which at the time varied from state to state.

G string try on