The Underwear Index: The Recession Indicator in Your Drawer
The men's underwear index is better psychology than it is economics. Where the Greenspan story came from, and what the sales data does and does not show.
How Calvin Klein Sold Sex in 1982
A pole vaulter, a wall on Santorini and a billboard over Times Square. What the 1982 Calvin Klein underwear campaign changed, and what it cost the garment.
Some links on this page are affiliate links. If you buy through one we may earn a small commission, at no extra cost to you. It never changes what we recommend. More on how this works.
The photograph is taken from below, which is the whole trick. A man leans back against a whitewashed wall on Santorini, head tipped away from the camera, weight on one hip, wearing nothing but a pair of white briefs. Bruce Weber shot it in 1982. The Getty holds a print of it under the title "Tom Hintnaus, for Calvin Klein, Santorini, Greece 1982", which is about as close to canonisation as a fashion advertisement gets.
Blown up to the height of a building and hung over Times Square in August 1982, it did something no men's underwear advertisement had done before. It stopped being about the product.
Everything men's underwear had been for a century was practical argument. Cooper's sold the Y-front in 1935 on the strength of its support and its patented fly The Y-Front at Ninety. Union suit manufacturers sold warmth. Jockey sold the closed crotch and put a wholesome illustrated everyman on the packet. The pitch was always: this is better made, and here is why. Klein's pitch was a body against a wall in the Aegean light, and the copy was his name.
The man in the photograph
Tomás Valdemar Hintnaus is worth knowing about, because he is usually reduced to "a model" and he was not one.
Born in Brazil in February 1958 to Czech parents and later an American citizen, Hintnaus was a serious pole vaulter. He won the 1980 United States Olympic trials and then did not go to Moscow, because the American boycott took the Games away from him. He went on to compete for Brazil, taking a bronze at the 1983 Pan American Games and vaulting at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. He has said, more or less cheerfully, that the photograph ended up eclipsing the athletics.
That matters to how the image reads. The body in the picture is not a gym body assembled for a shoot. It is a working athlete's body, built by an event that demands a very particular combination of lightness and power, and Weber photographed it as a classical object rather than a commercial one: low angle, hard Mediterranean sun, no props, no smile, no eye contact.
The reaction is the part everyone remembers and the part hardest to pin down precisely. Traffic-stopping crowds in Times Square, posters lifted from bus shelters, the billboard as an event in itself. These stories are repeated in almost every account and are plausible, but they are anecdote rather than record, and this site is not going to pretend otherwise.
What was actually being sold
Look at the garment rather than the man, which nobody did at the time and which is the more interesting exercise now.
It is a white cotton brief. Cut lower at the rise and closer at the front than the Jockey-descended American brief it was competing with, according to the fashion historian Shaun Cole, but structurally an ordinary garment. No new fibre. No new construction. Nothing in it that a good European maker had not been doing for years Slip: Why European Briefs Fit Differently.
What was new was on the outside of the waistband: the words CALVIN KLEIN, repeated around the body of the wearer, in a size legible across a room.
That is the actual invention, and it is worth being precise about why. Branded waistbands were not new in 1982. Manufacturers had been weaving their names into elastic for decades, because it identified the product in a drawer and reassured a customer at the point of sale. Jockey did it. Fruit of the Loom did it. The name was there for the same reason a name is inside a shoe.
Klein's move was to change what the name was for. It stopped being identification and became decoration. The waistband was scaled up, given a typeface with intent, and positioned to be seen above the waistband of a pair of jeans, which is why the jeans in the campaign's wider imagery always sit low. The logo went from an assurance to a statement, and once a garment carries a statement it can carry a price.
Why it worked when it should not have
There is a real puzzle here. Men had been buying underwear as an invisible consumable for a hundred years. Why did a photograph change that?
Partly because Klein had already run the experiment. The 1980 jeans campaign with Brooke Shields, directed by Richard Avedon, had established that his advertising could generate national argument and that the argument sold product. Underwear was the same technique applied to a category with less competition and far less advertising noise.
Partly because the timing was right in a way that had nothing to do with Klein. The early 1980s was the moment the gym became a mass activity in Anglophone cities, and a generation of men were, for the first time in modern memory, looking at their own bodies as projects. Weber's image arrived at exactly the point where a large number of men had a reason to care what they looked like undressed The Locker Room Question: Getting Over the Fear of Being Seen in Briefs.
And partly because underwear is bought and given. A branded garment is giftable in a way an unbranded one is not, because the brand does the work of signalling that thought was involved. That single fact reshaped the category's retail economics more than any advertisement did.
What it actually changed commercially
Here is where the usual telling goes wrong. It is customary at this point to produce figures: what Bloomingdale's turned over in a fortnight, what the line grossed in year one, what the campaign cost. Those numbers circulate widely, they are always the same numbers, and they trace back to trade press reporting of the period rather than to anything auditable. We are not printing them.
What can be said without a number attached is more useful anyway.
The category acquired a premium tier. Before 1982 men's underwear was priced as a commodity with a narrow spread between the cheapest and the dearest thing on a department store floor in the English-speaking world. After it, there was a designer shelf, and men would pay a substantial multiple for a garment that was not substantially better made.
Department stores rebuilt the department. Men's underwear moved from a back corner arranged by size and manufacturer to a branded space arranged by label, with imagery, which is how nearly every men's underwear floor on earth is still laid out.
The waistband became the product. Once the logo was the differentiator, every competitor needed one, and by the end of the decade an unbranded waistband read as a budget signal regardless of what was underneath it. That is a strange thing to have happened to a garment, and it is still true Calvin Klein vs Tommy Hilfiger: Are You Paying for the Waistband?.
And the advertising template hardened. Athlete or musician, monochrome, low angle, minimal copy, a name. Every underwear campaign since has either used that template or defined itself against it.
The 1992 sequel, and the boxer brief
The follow-up is usually treated as a separate story and it should not be.
In 1992 Klein put Mark Wahlberg, then Marky Mark, and Kate Moss in front of Herb Ritts, and ran the results on MTV among other places. It generated the same combination of outrage and sales as 1982, updated for a channel that had not existed the first time round.
The garment in those photographs mattered more than the photographs did. John Varvatos, who had joined Calvin Klein in 1990 as head of menswear design, is generally credited with pioneering the boxer brief there. His own account of its origin is unimprovable: they cut off a pair of long johns and thought it could be cool.
That garment, not the 1982 brief, is what actually conquered the world. Within a decade the boxer brief was the default men's underwear across most of the English-speaking world, and it remains so The Great Rebrand: How the Boxer Brief Won the Argument. It solved a genuine problem, which is that it gave men the support of a brief with the leg coverage that made them comfortable being seen in it, and it deserved to win on the merits The Boxer Brief Won, and It Deserved To.
The uncomfortable corollary is that a great many men switched to it not because they had tried both, but because the brief had quietly been recoded as either erotic or childish while nobody was looking, and the boxer brief was the option that carried no charge The White Brief: A Cultural History.
The licence, and what happens to a garment inside one
Now the part that gets left out of the celebratory retrospectives.
Calvin Klein Inc did not manufacture much of what carried the name. The business ran, increasingly, on licensing, and in the early 1990s the underwear business was licensed to the Warnaco Group. Phillips-Van Heusen bought Calvin Klein Inc in December 2002. What you buy today is a licence chain with a signature on it.
This is not a scandal and it is not unusual; most large fashion houses work this way. But it has a specific consequence for underwear that it does not have for a handbag. Underwear is a high-volume, low-margin, engineering-sensitive product. The difference between a good pair and a poor one lives in things that cost fractions of a penny per unit and that no advertisement can convey: whether the seams are flatlocked or overlocked, whether there is a separate gusset, whether the leg opening is bound or simply hemmed, what grade of elastic went into the band Anatomy of a Brief: Every Panel, Seam and Stitch Explained.
When the thing customers are buying is the name on the band, the pressure on every one of those decisions runs one way. Nobody has ever returned a pair because the gusset was omitted. They return it if the logo is wrong.
The honest cost
So: an image instead of a construction.
That is the trade the 1982 campaign made on behalf of the entire category, and forty years on the bill is legible. Men's underwear is now discussed almost entirely in terms of brand and silhouette. Ask most men what their underwear is made of and you will get "cotton", which is a legal minimum rather than an answer. Ask about seam type and you will get a blank look. The vocabulary that would let a customer tell a good garment from an expensive one simply did not develop in the English-speaking market, because for forty years nobody selling anything needed it to.
Compare the continental tradition, where Zimmerli, Hanro and Schiesser spent the same decades arguing about knit structure and fabric weight and are still doing it. Those companies are not better because they are European. They are better because their customers kept asking a question that Anglophone customers stopped asking in about 1983.
The second cost is narrower and more personal. A campaign built on a pole vaulter's body established, permanently, that this garment is a statement about the body inside it. That was liberating for some men and quietly disqualifying for many more, and the number of men who will tell you they "cannot wear" briefs, meaning they do not believe they are entitled to, is a direct inheritance from a billboard Why Men Are Frightened of Colour.
None of which is Weber's fault, or Hintnaus's, or even really Klein's. It is what happens when a functional object is handed to an image industry: the image is the part that scales.
What to take from it
The 1982 campaign is genuinely one of the great pieces of twentieth century advertising, and it is not a puff piece to say so. It took a garment nobody discussed and made it a subject. It gave men permission to have an opinion about their own underwear. It is also the reason the opinion most of them ended up with is about a logo.
The useful response is not to boycott the brand, which would be silly; the licensed cotton stretch trunk is a perfectly decent everyday garment and millions of men are happy in it cotton stretch trunk. The useful response is to buy the way the campaign trained you not to. Turn the thing inside out. Count the panels. Look at the seams and the leg finish. Then decide what the waistband is worth to you, knowing what it is plain waistband cotton brief.
Some men will conclude it is worth quite a lot, and that is a legitimate thing to buy. Just buy it knowingly, which is the one thing the billboard was designed to prevent Six Briefs That Built the Modern World fine gauge cotton brief.
Questions people ask
Who was the model in the 1982 Calvin Klein underwear advert?
Tom Hintnaus, born Tomás Valdemar Hintnaus in Brazil in 1958 to Czech parents. He was a competitive pole vaulter rather than a professional model: he won the 1980 US Olympic trials, missed the Moscow Games because of the American boycott, and later competed for Brazil, including at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. Bruce Weber photographed him on Santorini in Greece, and the image went up on a Times Square billboard in August 1982.
Who photographed the 1982 Calvin Klein underwear campaign?
Bruce Weber, the American photographer born in 1946, who went on to shoot much of Calvin Klein's imagery through the 1980s. The Santorini photograph of Tom Hintnaus is held in museum collections, including the J. Paul Getty Museum, under the title "Tom Hintnaus, for Calvin Klein, Santorini, Greece 1982". Weber's low camera angle and hard Mediterranean light are what give the image its classical, statue-like quality.
Did Calvin Klein invent the logo waistband?
Not exactly. Manufacturers had woven their names into underwear elastic for decades before 1982, mainly as identification. What Calvin Klein did was change the logo's purpose: scaling it up, treating it as decoration rather than a label, and building the advertising around the idea that it would be seen. Within a decade a visible branded waistband had become the category norm and an unbranded one read as budget, which was not the case before.
Why did Calvin Klein's 1982 campaign matter so much?
Because it shifted men's underwear from a functional purchase to a branded fashion object. Before 1982 the category was sold on construction and support; afterwards it was sold on image, which created a premium price tier that had not previously existed, reorganised how department stores displayed the product, and set the template nearly every underwear campaign has followed since. The commercial change was larger and more permanent than the scandal it caused.