I've dealt with this before - we had quite a lot of "scent buildup" combined with yellow deodorant residue in our clothes after years of using a wash and fold service, and athletic gear was especially bad. I figured I had nothing to lose, so experimented a bit, and what worked for me was an overnight soak in HOT water with a lot of sodium percarbonate (I used about 5 Tbsp of sodium percarbonate in a small dishpan and covered it with tin foil to keep the water warm even longer) followed by another overnight soak in a strong concentration of powder Persil for whites and then a hot wash with Persil. (Persil was just what I had on hand at the time, I'm sure you could substitute for Tide with Bleach powder) Now, I was ready to toss the clothes, so I used the hottest tap water and then on top of that added boiling water from a tea kettle even on synthetics. A couple of cotton/spandex shirts lost their stretch, but everything else turned out fine, however YMMV - I'm not sure the elastics in the underwear would take kindly to boiling, so just tap hot might be a better option. Among the other things I had tried unsuccessfully were borax, vinegar, Biz, STPP added to regular detergent.

Those culottes are not what I remember as culottes...they look more like palazzo pants cut to capris length. The culottes I used to wear way back were more like what we now call skorts. They were so much like skirts that you didn't know they had a crotch unless you spread your legs.

My biases are biases, they aren't necessarily completely rational. I work in a profession that, when I seems to go to meetings seems to be divided between a large majority that dresses in a bland uniform and a small minority that seems to wear quirky things, (and strange eyeglasses seem to be a part of it). Part of it is that I don't mesh well personality wise with a lot of people in my "real" profession, so I think I associate the glasses with a type within a subpopulation. However, we do have affiliations with our profession in Europe, and especially the German members seem to wear clothes that seem outlandish to the drab Americans. The Japanese contingent all seems to wear identical black suits no matter the weather or location. One well known speaker clinician presented a general session (he's German) in gold lame shoes and he has at least one pair of eyeglasses that are yellow and Swifty Lazar bug-eyed size. Because he is German and dresses like that, he seems to have complete credibility. If some guy from Indiana presented dressed like that, I have my doubts. (And that's just me, I think that would be a general opinion). I feel like my conservative dress is just another form of expression, not that I have become more conservative. I also went through a several year period where I bought nothing but black, except for socks (which were generally white). But the black period was not a conscious decision, I didn't realize it until it was pointed out to me.

Sky Dancers, yes, rob333! One afternoon when my son was five, we were watching kids' programming. A commercial for Sky Dancers came on-- smiling girls outside launching those spinning, helicoptering fairies to the sky. Immediately following, came a commercial featuring a camouflaged jeep bumping over rough terrain and some sort of elbows-out, knees bent, posing, grim-faced, yelling boys shooting their big toy guns. If I remember correctly it was actually the jeep being advertised, not the toy guns. When that commercial ended, my son said to me, "I think I'm more like a girl than a boy." Here, I understood that he was saying he liked the Sky Dancers better and understood, even at five, that those were presented as being for girls, while the jeeps were presented for boys. Heck, I had to agree with him: the helicoptering fairies were much cooler than the vehicles which were really pretty common if you take away the camo paint job. I did talk to my son then and who-knows-how-many other times about being aware that people were trying to persuade us, to bend us to spend money in order to feel or look the way the commercial seems to be. And that we have the ability to weigh, to choose, to go with our own assessment. I told him that the idea of boy toys and girl toys was not right, but that he was going to run into that idea a lot. That Christmas we bought him some launchable spinning 'copters that came two in a package, at a much better price than the Sky Dancers. I see nowadays that the very same toys are sold in the same packaging at Harbor Freight. They come in several cheerful colors--no camo, just wings.