Tag
history
9 articles tagged history.
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Underwear · 11 min read
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.
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Underwear · 11 min read
Before the Brief: Loincloths, Fundoshi and Four Thousand Years
Linen in Tutankhamun's tomb, leather trunks in a London well, a length of Japanese cotton: the history of underwear before briefs, over four thousand years.
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Swimwear · 11 min read
The Suit Ban of 2010: When Swimming Outlawed Its Own Records
The 2010 FINA ban on polyurethane swimsuits: what the suits actually did, why 43 records fell in eight days in Rome, and how the brief came back.
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Underwear · 11 min read
The Boxer Short Is a Pyjama
Are boxer shorts good underwear? They are cut from the same pattern as pyjama shorts and sold on a health claim the evidence never backed. Where they belong.
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Underwear · 5 min read
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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Underwear · 6 min read
In Praise of the Loose Boxer
Boxer shorts support nothing and fail under tailoring, yet remain the best thing in the drawer. What they are good at, and whether woven really beats knitted.
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Underwear · 4 min read
The White Brief: A Cultural History
The white brief history, from 600 pairs sold in a Chicago blizzard in 1935 to the Y-front joke: why the most mocked garment still sells in huge numbers.
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Swimwear · 3 min read
Speed On In Your Speedos: The Sydney Knitting Mill That Named the Swim Brief
How a 1914 Sydney mill named the swim brief in a staff competition, won eight golds at Melbourne and survived the suit ban that reset the record books.
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Underwear · 4 min read
The Great Rebrand: How the Boxer Brief Won the Argument
Boxer briefs vs briefs: the popular style kept the brief's support and the boxer's name. How a rebrand won an argument the brief had already settled.