The girls are the ones who want to buy the lingerie. Some of them may do this to please their husbands, but trust me, as a girl who wore Catholic school uniforms for 12 years, regulation of women's personal appearance results in more obsession about it, not less.

We didn't have to cover our whole bodies, but we had a very small range of main garments we could wear. Therefore, we expressed our girliness with non-regulated items: jewelry, makeup, hair, shoes, scarves, purses.

A Saudi woman, enveloped and repressed, will express her girliness as close to her skin as possible where the sex police can't find it. (Unlike the Saudi world, men with clubs didn't patrol the halls and beat my classmates and me for rolling up our skirts to show a little more leg.) That silk is for her, to remind her with every move who and what she really is.