Founded in 1908, the ineluctable appeal of the bargain outlet Filene’s Basement has made it a venerated Boston institution. 

The main attraction is the designer apparel with often-repeatedly slashed prices. The fluid store layout allows you to assemble a whole outfit and then quickly locate matching shoes, handbag, scarf, and gloves. Then there are the hills of clothes that require you to burrow like an insane groundhog while scanning tags for sizes, prices, and Automatic Markdown start dates. Plus, shopping among the mixed clientele of unabashed fashionistas, horsey Revere housewives, and dazed tourists makes us a community. Because, deep down, women are really all the same creature. 

The icing on the cake: Who doesn’t love venturing into the women’s fitting room and catching an eyeful of nude female flesh? For free.

The women’s fitting room is an communal dressing room with about a dozen full-length mirrors, each flanked by a clothes hook. For the first-time shopper, it is a bit of a shock: You collect the number of items tag from the eagle-eyes attendant, turn a corner, and are faced with a dozen women in various states of undress. Women often enter the dressing room and just stand there, perhaps experiencing an unpleasant high school locker room flashback, perhaps regretting their day’s choice of underwear, perhaps wondering if they’re on a hidden camera television show: How can a place that appears in all of the travel guides not offer partitioned dressing rooms? Am I in Boston or Bogota?

After the First Timer recovers from the shock of witnessing strange women pushing rolls of thigh fat past cinched waistbands, she will usually try on clothes with the goal of covering herself as much as possible. But general apathy paired with widespread female American body anxiety will stop other women from snickering at any cellulite-ridden butt fat flapping around as one extricate’s oneself from a pair of cigarette pants in a standing position. 

Demureness is a quality that is only good in small doses, in the right situations. At a church function, for example, it is entirely correct to repress the urge to take off your blouse and shake your hips to “Onward Christian Soldiers.” But Filene’s Basement is a decidedly ungodly place, forcing women to choose between cherished modesty and a $49 BCBG party dress. Most women pick the dress.

I used to be mortified to undress in front of strangers, but overcame my bashfulness after discovering a passion for saunas. At first, I was averse to lounging around a tiny, over-heated room with nude and towel-draped strangers. Keeping my eyes open seemed a bad idea, so I would snap my eyes shut and manually secure my towel around my body. But after four or five otherwise-relaxing sauna visits, I observed many women displaying nude bodies that I judged to be much worse than mine. Who knew human skin had a limitless capacity for stretch marks?

One day, I entered the sauna to find it empty except for a young woman with a smooth, lean naked body, laying on the beach with knees bent and slightly spread apart. Her crotch faced me directly; it resembled Hitler’s face in numerous ways, all too explicit to explain here. It felt strangely rude to cover myself with a towel, so I gathered my courage and sat there, nude. Other women came in and barely glanced at me (perhaps blinded by the young lady’s crotch) and I began to relax.

The morale of the story: Getting undressed in public is not always good, but it is not always bad. In fact, you can make the sauna or the communal dressing rooms at Filene’s a real fun place by whipping out a camera and pretending to take pictures of the other women. They’re scream in delighted surprise, and you’ll laugh like old friends when you reveal that the camera is not loaded. Instant anxiety buster.