Knickers in a twist: why M&S selling crotchless panties isn’t as outrageous as it seems
Marks & Spencer has started selling Ann Summers crotchless knickers on their website, which has been met with outrage online. However, experts say this is just another step in the evolution of underwear trends, and the store has always followed fashion with regard to their lingerie designs. The introduction of Ann Summers could be about continuing to engage the demographic of people under 30, who made up a third of underwear sales in 2024.
- ▪Marks & Spencer has started selling Ann Summers crotchless knickers on their website.
- ▪The store has sold underwear since the 1920s and has always followed fashion with regard to their lingerie designs.
- ▪People under 30 made up a third of underwear sales in 2024, double that of 2023.
The Guardian — UK publishes from United Kingdom and files mainly under news. We currently carry 241 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | The Guardian — UK |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/aug/01/marks-and-spencers-ann-summers-lingerie |
| Publication time | Sat, 01 Aug 2026 08:00:47 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-01T08:15:39.805Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-01T08:15:39.805Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | J5H5cU_KCdm_ · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
In 2024, M&S reported a third of underwear sales were made by people under 30. Photograph: Yui Mok/PAView image in fullscreenIn 2024, M&S reported a third of underwear sales were made by people under 30. Photograph: Yui Mok/PAMarks & SpencerKnickers in a twist: why M&S selling crotchless panties isn’t as outrageous as it seemsSome have called it ‘S&M’, but partnership with Ann Summers is less a scandal than another step in a century of evolving underwear trends, experts sayLauren CochraneSat 1 Aug 2026 04.00 EDTSharePrefer the Guardian on GoogleThe news that Marks & Spencer is selling Ann Summers crotchless knickers on their website has been greeted – as might be expected – with outrage online, being described as everything from “tawdry” to “S & M”.But it could be this is just the latest…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Guardian — UK.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from The Guardian — UK
