Inside Oh Comely's subscription box for Issue 27 was Sophie Scott's pattern for knitting your very own merkin. Here box curator Alice Naylor explains the appeal of this rather eccentric wig. 

Enjoy receiving the unexpected? You can subscribe to the box here.

Who amongst us has not had a conversation with an individual you might wish to impress with your gravitas and discovered too late that your shirt is gaping open? Or strode with tremendous purpose across an open-plan office and found your underwear tucked up in your pants? Recounting those tales and exploiting their comedic value enables us to step back and see them for what they are. Using comedy to deal with the discomfort and absurdity of how we fear we may be viewed, and how we view our own vulnerable selves.

Before: ball of wool.

What we alter, remove or add to our bodies is a volatile subject and body hair—the lack or excess of it—evokes as strong a response as any of those around size, shape and weight. The gender hierarchies that celebrate the hirsute man determine that less is more for women’s pubic hair. 

What if there was an option to change your pubic hair according to your mood? A decorative and witty item that you could tailor exactly how you liked? The answer is blowing in the wind, my friend.

Drop the word merkin into a conversation, and its pleasingly onomatopoeic resonance is comical even if you are not familiar with its meaning: a pubic wig. The use of merkins as a covering for the pudenda has been around since the fifteenth century. Prostitutes made use of them to hide syphilis scars and they evolved into decorative and erotic outerwear.

After: tool of subversion.

With the desire to subvert a serious subject, let me turn to the crafting element of this month’s Oh Comely subscription box (see page 16): Knit Your Own Merkin. My collaborator, Sophie Scott, did not blanche, giggle or recoil when I asked her to design a knitting pattern. We saw it as a defiant stance against pubic hair fascism with a comedic twist.

You may use your merkin as intended. But its simple triangular shape offers myriad other ways in which it can be displayed and Sophie suggested one of the very best uses I could have imagined: bunting. We suggest a sewing bee that unites a group of mischievous knitters to customise their own merkins in different colours and yarns. Hung together, festooned along your windows, walls and lintels, Merkin Bunting is a celebration of our right to wear our pubic hair with pride.