The Y-Front at Ninety
The Y-front went on sale in a Chicago window in a 1935 blizzard. Ninety years of Coopers, Lyle and Scott, and the fly that turns out to be proper engineering.
Launderette: The Sixty Seconds That Rewrote Men's Underwear
The history of boxer shorts is an advertising history: a Times Square billboard in 1982, a launderette in 1985, and the hybrid that arrived in 1992.
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Almost every other garment you own was changed by a designer solving a problem. The trench coat got its shape from rain and trenches. The polo shirt got its collar from a tennis player who was tired of being hot. Progress in clothing usually looks like someone fixing something.
Men's underwear is the exception. For the last forty years the shape of this drawer has been decided almost entirely by advertising, and the design has trailed along behind, catching up with whatever the campaigns had already made desirable. Three pieces of film and photography did most of the work. It is worth knowing which three, because you are probably still living inside the consequences of all of them.
1982: a man on a billboard in Athens
The first is a photograph rather than a film. In 1982 Calvin Klein put a Bruce Weber image of the Brazilian pole vaulter Tom Hintnaus, lit hard against a whitewashed wall on Santorini, wearing nothing but a pair of white briefs, on a billboard in Times Square.
Underwear advertising up to that point had been packaging. Men in pale, well-lit rooms, standing in a manner suggesting they had been interrupted while doing something wholesome. The product was sold on cotton content and multipack value, aimed largely at the women who were buying most of it.
The Hintnaus billboard sold a body. It treated men's underwear the way women's underwear had been sold for decades, as an object of desire rather than a household consumable, and it worked so thoroughly that it is now difficult to explain how startling it was. The brief was, at that moment, the most fashionable garment in America.
That is worth holding onto, because within a decade the same garment would be a joke, and nothing about the garment had changed.
1985: a launderette in the American Midwest that was actually in London
Three years later, Bartle Bogle Hegarty made a sixty-second advertisement for Levi's 501s in which a young man called Nick Kamen walked into a launderette, undressed to Marvin Gaye, put his jeans in a machine and sat down to wait in a pair of white boxer shorts.
The commercial was built to sell jeans. It sold jeans extremely well, and it also sold boxer shorts to a country that had largely stopped wearing them. The numbers quoted for what happened next vary enormously depending on who is telling the story and how much they were paid to tell it, so treat any specific percentage you read with suspicion. What is not in dispute is the direction. British men who had worn briefs their whole lives went out and bought woven boxer shorts, and manufacturers who had been quietly winding the line down found themselves unable to keep up.
What makes Launderette interesting is not the sales figure. It is that the boxer short in that advertisement is not doing anything. It is not more comfortable on screen. It has no feature. It performs no function the film draws attention to. Its entire proposition is that the man wearing it is relaxed and unbothered and looks like that, and the garment was chosen by a stylist because it read as casual against the formality of a brief.
An entire category turned over on a styling decision.
1992: the hybrid arrives, with a photographer attached
The third is Calvin Klein again, now with Herb Ritts behind the camera and Mark Wahlberg in front of it, launching a garment that had not previously existed in any commercially meaningful way: the boxer brief.
The design credit generally goes to John Varvatos, then at Calvin Klein, and the idea was straightforward enough. Take the supportive construction of the brief, which men had been told was unfashionable, and extend the leg down the thigh, which men had been told was fashionable. The resulting garment kept essentially all of the brief's engineering and essentially none of the boxer's looseness The Great Rebrand: How the Boxer Brief Won the Argument.
It became the most successful men's underwear launch of the modern era, and it is now the default style across most of the Western world. It also happens to be a genuinely excellent garment, which is a separate fact and one worth stating clearly The Boxer Brief Won, and It Deserved To. Both things are true. It was well designed and it was extraordinarily well sold, and it is not obvious which of the two mattered more.
What the pattern tells you
Line the three up and something slightly uncomfortable becomes visible.
In 1982 the brief was desirable because a photographer made it desirable. In 1985 the boxer short was desirable because a stylist made it desirable and a director filmed it well. In 1992 a hybrid was desirable because it let men keep the fit of the first while borrowing the name of the second. In none of those three moments did anyone discover anything about the human body. What all three did destroy was the old assumption that underwear is a dull, invisible, purely functional purchase, which is the assumption a famous recession indicator was built on The Underwear Index: The Recession Indicator in Your Drawer.
The practical consequences are still with you. The reason a great many men in Britain, Ireland and North America feel a flicker of something when they consider buying briefs is not experience, because most of them have never worn a well-fitting pair as an adult. It is residue from a marketing cycle that peaked before they were born The Locker Room Question: Getting Over the Fear of Being Seen in Briefs. The reason the boxer brief feels like the neutral, obvious, unremarkable choice is that a great deal of money was spent making it feel that way.
None of which is an argument against any of these garments. The boxer brief earned its place, the boxer short is a delight in its proper context In Praise of the Loose Boxer, and the brief remains the most efficient piece of engineering in the drawer. The argument is only this: whatever is in your drawer right now, you did not arrive at it by reasoning. You inherited it from three advertising campaigns, and you are allowed to revisit the decision on your own terms Briefs, Boxers, Boxer Briefs or Trunks: How to Choose.
Questions people ask
Did the Levi's launderette advert really cause a boxer short boom?
The boom is well documented and the advert is universally credited as the trigger. The specific figures, particularly the very large percentage increases that circulate online, are much less reliable and rarely trace back to an auditable source. Treat the story as true in outline and unverified in its numbers.
Who invented the boxer brief?
Calvin Klein launched it commercially in 1992 and John Varvatos, then designing for the brand, is generally credited with the design. Hybrid long-legged supportive underwear had existed before in sportswear and in various patents, so "invented" is doing some work in that sentence. What Calvin Klein unambiguously did was make it a mass-market category.
Why were briefs fashionable in 1982 and unfashionable in 1992?
Nothing about the garment changed. The cultural coding did, and it did so because a competing product was marketed very effectively against it. This is the most consistent lesson in the whole history of the category and it applies just as much to whatever is currently being sold to you as inevitable The White Brief: A Cultural History.