Underwear (2015)

This drama is exactly what I needed after 3 cliche love triangles in a row. I'm putting this one up there with my all time female-power favorites, alongside Mondai No Aru Restaurant and Hanawake No Yon Shimai.

This story is focused on two characters: a young woman whose passion is knowing about fabrics and who moves to Ginza to start a job in an atelier (played by Kiritani Mirei) and a middle aged woman with a great career in the designing world and high standards for quality in the lingerie she creates (amazingly portrayed by Mao Daichi). When you see it at first glance, you might think it will turn into a The Devil Wears Prada scenario, and when the series itself starts with an argument on why do women try to look beautiful all the time, I feared this was going to be another drama in which the younger generation has to learn the traditions and cave in, even though they don’t agree with things (I’m watching HOPE at the same time, you see), but this drama surprised me greatly.

The main relationship in this series is the one between these two characters, who have two different ideas of what beauty really is and of what a woman wants to feel to be more like herself. There isn’t much romance in it (and whatever hints there are, they aren’t the focus) and it isn’t solely focused on the young character making her way through the world, there’s plenty about the perspective on mature women in the fashion business and how they are perceived at certain ages and what that means for them (mainly in the character of Nanjo Mayumi), on how competition between women is sought for and turns out being detrimental to all involved (for example with Fumika, Mizuki and Sarii, among others) and how, even in positions of power earned by hard work, women still don't have the freedom to choose as much as they would want to (like the editor and the reporter of Conscious Magazine).

My favorite thing is that they don’t talk about beauty as a single concept. Yes, the lead has to go through the process of looking less rough and more fashionable, and she also has to start getting along with how the fashion industry works, but there’s a lot here on creativity, integrity, customer importance, self expression and the painstaking task of being a woman who wants to succeed solo in Japanese society and the isolation that can create when it becomes opposed to the personal life they’re supposed to carry on with (aka husband and kids).

I didn’t give this one a rating as high as Mondai No Aru Restaurant because I feel there’s more stuff that could have been addressed and wasn’t (for example, I felt that the lead's relationship with one of the female models had more chemistry than with the couple guys they tried to hint some sort of thing with, that could have gone places), whereas Mondai No Aru Restaurant covered a lot of aspects with their story, but this is certainly another one of those great ones and I hope there’s more like these in the future. After so many naive and mistreated leading ladies with jerk male leads with inexcusable behaviors, I really needed a drama like this, in which female characters showcase their true worth.

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