Gone are the days when your underwear was your own private affair. The look-at-me outfits of now necessitate ever more complex methods of accommodating your privates. Time was, the point of underwear was to be invisible, not to impinge on outfits or to help one wear them more effortlessly. All that has changed; the equation is reversed. It seems now that your outfit needs to be somehow suggestive of exactly how hard your underwear is working.

Take Kendall Jenner's thigh-high slits last week:

Perhaps counterintuitively, this Fausto Puglisi gown foregrounds the underwear it requires (or, if we're being accurate, doesn't require). Underwear has gone from being the sartorial elephant in the room – something we all know is going on but don't speak of, out of politesse – to being the icing on the cake. And the more brief your briefs, the more garrulous your gusset, the more outré your undercarriage, the more attention and praise you will get.

A case in point, Fig. 1, the 'C string': a horseshoe-shaped piece of plastic, sometimes covered in lace that will facilitate the wearing of high-slit dresses (high now = above the mons pudenda, rather than mid-thigh) without any knicker elastic showing. Because that would be tacky.

That means you can wear dresses like Kendall's Puglisi, or Anja's Anthony Vaccarello. The papers went crazy for the fact Rubik had gone commando at the 2012 Met Gala in that look, but here at Never Underdressed, we're quietly confident she just slotted the horseshoe around the pony and sashayed away.

It also means you can wear something like Gwyneth's Antonio Berardi, where less actual groin is bared, but which has tricky sheer side panels that would perplex that average knicker drawer. No matter, a C-string would solve this too.

The red carpet has thrown up a new and urgent need for an underwear revolution with the increased prominence of body parts that we previously had no idea existed, such as side-boob, under-boob and left gunwhale. And while, thankfully, the proliferation of gowns that bare one's lower abs call for no real adjustments to your underpinnings, the growth area for event-dressing seems to be in perplexing the wearer into a state of naked turmoil.

Take Fig. 2, for example: Jamie Alexander's naked Azzaro Couture dress last year. No, we hadn't heard of her either – something this practically frontless backless and sideless dress seemed destined to change but, satisfyingly for some (*avoids eye contact*) hasn't.

At the time, last November, we racked our brains as to how Ms. Alexander could possibly have adorned herself downstairs, given her dress's almost deliberate lack of coverage in crucial areas. You'll understand, at this point, what I meant earlier about the point of underwear doing a volte face of late. Like a celebrity hiding from the paps when doing community service but posing for them when opportunistically caught doing some charity work.

Was Jamie Alexander wearing a flesh-toned version of this, Fig. 3?

No, too cumbersome. Too much coverage.

It wasn't until last week we found out her secret, in the latest revelatory extreme underwear snaps. She's clearing wearing, Fig. 4, the TOWIE-endorsed c*ck sock, perfect for when you nonchalantly alight on a dress that is sheer across most of its front and down one side.

It behoves us all to admire how much devotion to an even suntan goes into the invention, and subsequent wearing, of a piece like this.

And speaking of hooves, here's another extreme underwear example, although its purpose now, in the light of recent developments, seem rather pedestrian. The 'Smooth Groove' (Fig. 5) is designed to be inserted (that's all I'll say on that) to avoid the appearance of anything unpleasant when wearing a very tight pair of trousers.

A pair of trousers! *Barked laughter* Who even remembers when anyone wore anything as boringly conservative as a pair of trousers that covers both behind and in front but also both sides? Bahahahaha.

Next thing, you'll be telling me your new dress needs one of those stick-on fillet bras (Fig. 6)

Which is not only a throwback to a more innocent time, but is also years out of date. After all, Rihanna taught us only recently how to deal with underwear in the age of modern red carpet dressing (Fig. 7) – when your smalls are getting more column inches than you are, just ditch them altogether.

Don't try and tell me that isn't progress.

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