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.
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.
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Open the drawer. Somewhere near the back is a pair with a waistband gone soft and slightly wavy, the elastic no longer pulling the fabric flat, the cotton three shades off whatever colour it started as. You know it is finished. You have known for months. It is still in there because replacing it has never once been the most pressing thing you had to do that week.
That small, universal act of postponement is the entire basis of one of the most repeated ideas in popular economics. The men's underwear index holds that because nobody sees the garment, men defer replacing it longer than almost anything else they own, and that a dip in sales therefore signals household stress before it shows up anywhere else. It is credited to Alan Greenspan and presented as a slightly cheeky but fundamentally sound piece of Fed wisdom.
It is a wonderful story. It is a considerably worse instrument than its reputation suggests, and the honest version is more interesting than the myth.
Where the story actually comes from
The trail is shorter than you would expect for something quoted this often.
The source almost every retelling leads back to is a segment by the NPR correspondent Robert Krulwich, broadcast on 1 January 2008 under the title "Alan Greenspan's Underwear Drawer". Krulwich described the former chairman's fondness for obscure private data: scrap steel, dry cleaning receipts, the small unglamorous numbers that tell you what people are actually doing rather than what they say they will do.
Underwear was the example that stuck. In Krulwich's retelling, the most private garment a man owns is his underpants, seen by nobody except other men in a locker room, and who cares about them. Sales, on this account, are ordinarily close to flat. Krulwich's version of Greenspan's reasoning is that on the rare occasions the line dips, "men are so pinched that they are deciding not to replace underpants".
Notice what that is not. It is not a paper, a Fed working note or a line in a policy statement. It is a broadcast journalist recounting, conversationally, a conversation. Greenspan has been asked about it repeatedly since and news organisations have gone on attributing the idea to him without objection, which is fair grounds for accepting that he said something along these lines. It is not grounds for treating it as a documented methodology, and the number of articles that present it as one is a small case study in how citations decay.
The problem with 2008, which is the case everybody cites
If you look for proof that the index works, you will be sent to the financial crisis. The men's underwear index, the story goes, called it.
The material behind that claim is thinner than the confidence attached to it. The most widely circulated evidence in 2009 was a market research forecast from Mintel, which had earlier projected modest growth in the men's underwear category for the year ahead and then revised that projection to a modest decline. Newspapers and blogs picked it up enthusiastically, because it fitted the story perfectly and because a recession is a hungry news cycle.
But a revised forecast is not an outcome. It is a research firm updating its own guess in the middle of the worst consumer environment in seventy years, which is what any competent research firm would have done for almost every discretionary category at once. Using it as confirmation that underwear specifically predicted the downturn is circular: the forecast was revised because the downturn was already visible.
There is a second, quieter problem. Even if category sales did fall, the index is advertised as a leading indicator, something that moves before the economy does. Sales data for a narrow apparel subcategory arrives monthly at best, usually with a lag, and often only through paid subscription panels. By the time you can see the dip, the recession has been in the newspapers for a season.
Then 2020 happened
The cleanest test the theory has faced in recent memory went the wrong way.
The pandemic produced an economic shock of a severity the 2008 recession took eighteen months to build up to, compressed into a few weeks. Household income cratered for millions of people. Spending on apparel collapsed. If the index is real, this is where it should have screamed.
Instead, NPD reported that men's underwear sales in the United States rose in the second half of 2020, while the men's apparel category as a whole fell sharply. The explanation was not economic optimism. It was that people were at home, wearing soft clothes, and the boundary between underwear and clothing had quietly moved. Underwear was one of the few things anybody had a reason to buy.
You can rescue the theory from this if you want to: a uniquely strange shock, stimulus payments distorting the picture, a category that happened to benefit from working at home. All of that is arguable. But an indicator that requires an essay of special pleading every time it fails is doing the thing astrology does, and an economist should be suspicious of it on exactly those grounds.
The garment stopped being invisible, which breaks the mechanism
The deeper objection is the one that should matter most to anyone who cares about the product rather than the punchline.
The index depends on a premise: that men's underwear is a purely functional, unbranded, unseen commodity, bought grudgingly and replaced only when it disintegrates. That described the American market reasonably well in the middle of the twentieth century, when the category was multipacks of white cotton and a handful of very large manufacturers The White Brief: A Cultural History.
It has not described the market since 1982. When Calvin Klein put a logo on the outside of a waistband and a photograph of a pole vaulter on a billboard, the garment acquired a second life as a fashion object, a gift and a signifier How Calvin Klein Sold Sex in 1982. A Levi's television advert later did something comparable for boxer shorts in Britain Launderette: The Sixty Seconds That Rewrote Men's Underwear. Today a meaningful share of the category is bought as a present, bought on promotion, bought because somebody saw a waistband in a changing room, or bought because a man decided to change styles entirely The Great Rebrand: How the Boxer Brief Won the Argument.
Every one of those purchases has a different sensitivity to household income than the grim replacement of a worn-out pair. A category that is part necessity, part fashion and part gift does not produce a clean signal about deferred maintenance, because the necessity portion and the fashion portion move for entirely different reasons and the data does not separate them.
Put simply: the index assumes underwear is boring. The whole point of the last forty years is that it stopped being boring.
What you can actually measure, and what you cannot
There is a measurement problem underneath all of this that rarely gets mentioned.
Price data for the category exists and is public. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks men's underwear closely enough to publish notes on how it handles quality adjustment when a manufacturer changes a garment's specification, and producer price series for underwear are available through the Federal Reserve's own data service. If you want to know what underwear costs, the state will tell you free of charge.
Unit sales are another matter. There is no public series for how many pairs of men's briefs the country bought last month. That sits inside commercial panels run by firms such as Circana and Mintel, and it is expensive, opaque to outsiders, and revised. Almost every "underwear index" story you will ever read is therefore built on one line from a proprietary dataset the reader cannot inspect, filtered through a press release.
That is not a scandal. It is simply why the index can never be properly falsified in public, which is also why it never dies.
The company it keeps
The underwear index belongs to a family of indicators that share a structure: a plausible behavioural story, a memorable name, an authoritative figure attached, and almost no testing.
Its closest relative is the lipstick index, attributed to Leonard Lauder, who observed that lipstick sales at his company rose after the attacks of September 2001 and suggested that women buy small affordable luxuries when large ones are out of reach. That was one executive's observation about one company's product line. When people went looking for it in the 2008 recession the pattern did not hold in the same way, and the commentary quietly migrated to other cosmetics categories rather than abandoning the idea. Charlotte Palermino's dissection of the lipstick index makes the mechanism explicit: repetition is doing the work that evidence is supposed to do.
The same goes for the skirt length theory, the champagne index and a dozen others. They persist because they are teachable in one sentence and because they flatter the reader with the feeling of seeing through the official numbers. That does not make them worthless. It makes them anecdotes with good public relations.
What the story gets right
And yet. Strip away the false precision and there is something real in there, which is why the idea has survived twenty years of nobody checking it.
The genuine insight is not about aggregate sales. It is about the order in which households cut. When money is tight, people protect what is visible and defer what is not. The car gets washed, the shoes get polished, the shirt gets replaced, and the thing under the shirt waits. That operates at the level of the individual drawer whether or not it is ever legible in a national dataset.
Which has a practical consequence. Deferring underwear replacement feels free. It is not. Elastic that has lost its recovery pulls unevenly, a hem that has started to curl ropes across the thigh, and a garment that no longer holds its shape stops doing the one job it exists to do The Drawer Audit: How Many Briefs You Need and When to Replace Them. It is a small daily tax paid in low-grade irritation, invisible precisely because it accrues so slowly.
The counter-move is not to spend more. It is to spend deliberately. A well constructed pair with a proper waistband and a bound leg opening will outlast three cheap ones and still be pleasant in year four Buy It Once: The Durability Guide to Briefs That Last Years. If your budget is genuinely tight, the honest answer is often the plain option from a serious maker rather than the branded one, and there is no shame in that at all The Best Cheap Underwear That Is Not a False Economy cotton rib brief.
Run the index on yourself instead
Forget the national economy. The version that will actually improve your week takes four minutes.
Empty the drawer onto the bed. Stretch a hand's width of each waistband and let go. If it does not snap back instantly and completely, that pair is finished, regardless of how the fabric looks. Check the leg openings for curling and the seat for the thin, slightly translucent patch that means the knit has given up.
Whatever fails, bin it. Not "move it to the back", which is how the situation arose. Then count what remains. Fewer than a fortnight's worth and you have a gap, and the gap is the reason you have been wearing the bad ones at all Against the Multipack.
Replace in twos and threes rather than a panic buy of twelve, so you find out whether you like a garment before you own six of it. And wash the survivors cool, because heat kills elastic and a tumble dryer will age a waistband faster than a year of wearing it How to Wash Underwear Properly merino boxer brief.
The honest verdict
The men's underwear index is not an economic indicator. It is a parable about how households behave when they are frightened, dressed in the borrowed authority of a central banker and kept alive by the fact that nobody can check it and everybody enjoys repeating it.
That is not a small thing to be. Popular economics works by finding a homely object that makes an abstraction concrete, and a drawer of postponed decisions does that better than a chart of consumer confidence ever will. Keep the parable. Tell it at dinner. Do not put money behind it.
And if reading this made you think about the pair at the back of your own drawer, the index has done the only useful work it is capable of: reminding a man that the cheapest thing he owns is the one quietly making his day worse Five Briefs Worth the Money Schiesser fine rib brief.
Questions people ask
Is the men's underwear index a real economic indicator?
Not in any rigorous sense. It is an informal observation, popularised through a 2008 NPR segment by Robert Krulwich recounting Alan Greenspan's interest in obscure private data, rather than a tested or published methodology. Underwear unit sales are not available as a public series, so the claim cannot be checked properly outside paid market research panels. Treat it as a memorable story about how households defer invisible spending, not as something you would ever act on.
Did Alan Greenspan really invent the underwear index?
He is universally credited with it, and the attribution has stood unchallenged for nearly two decades, but the documentary trail is a single broadcast retelling rather than anything Greenspan wrote himself. The usual account has it that he mentioned men's underwear sales as one of several unglamorous datasets he watched, alongside things like scrap steel and dry cleaning. That is plausible and consistent with his known habits. It is not the same as a formal Greenspan indicator.
Did men's underwear sales fall during the 2008 recession?
The evidence most often cited is a market research forecast that was revised downward during 2009, which is not the same as measured sales falling, and it was revised at a point when the recession was already obvious. More tellingly, during the far sharper shock of 2020, NPD reported that US men's underwear sales rose in the second half of the year even as men's apparel overall fell steeply. The indicator has failed at least one clear test.
Why do men keep wearing worn-out underwear?
Because the cost of not replacing it is invisible and arrives in tiny instalments. Nobody sees the garment, no single day is ruined by it, and there is always something more urgent to buy, so the decision gets deferred indefinitely. That behaviour is exactly what the underwear index describes, and it is the part of the theory that is genuinely well observed even though the economic prediction built on top of it does not hold.