THE DESIGNER underwear display in Marshall Field & Co. men`s department is a work of art. All cubes and cubby holes, it rises from the main aisle like a piece of modern sculpture topped with mannequin groins swathed in narrow strips of cranberry, sky blue and aquamarine.
The briefs on the shelves beneath aren`t packaged in cellophane. They come in clear tubes, black plastic cases and cardboard boxes decorated with the image of a near-naked baseball player or an unzipped fly. The names on the labels–Christian Dior, Calvin Klein–suggest high fashion. Obviously these are not mere underpants; they are Jockey elance or Skants or Jeans-Brief, the Arrow Brigade or Breve Ultimo Seta Totale, which probably is Italian for ”fig leaf in pure silk.”
Behind these adornments, on more staid and conventional shelves, the white cotton Jockey Classic Briefs lie in neat, sized piles, so many pale patriarchs overseeing their vivid offspring.
Who would have thought they could beget men`s bikini drawers with
”luster tones” that sparkle like the metal-flake paint on a hot rod or Jockey For Her, fast becoming a sales leader in women`s panties? The beleaguered manager of the Field`s branch store that introduced Jockey shorts to the world 50 years ago had no idea he was launching a juggernaut. On that January day in 1935, all he saw were skivvies in the window and snow in the streets. A blizzard had enveloped Chicago, and here he was trying to sell underwear with no legs.
Pull the display, he ordered, cancel the ads. Before his people could do either, the shorts sold out–600 pairs before noon. It was a hot start on a cold day, and things only got warmer. In the next three months, buyers purchased 30,000 pairs. So popular did the shorts become that Cooper`s Underwear Co. of Kenosha, Wis., which designed and marketed the garment, eventually changed its name to Jockey International.
FOR HALF A century, the classic brief has hung on through thick and thin, allowing ”scientific suspension and restful buoyancy,” spawning countless variations and imitations. It has survived the boxer rebellions of generations of college students and the myth that tight underwear leads to sterility.
At a national sales convention held recently in Miami, employees of Jockey International staged a birthday party, complete with a model in briefs and a giant birthday cake shaped like a pair of underpants. Jim Palmer, the baseball star who turned himself into beefcake by posing in Jockey ads, was there. So, too, was the underwear company`s corporate hierarchy, which has plenty to celebrate. In all shapes, sizes and colors Jockey International sold millions of briefs last year.
Jockey shorts are no longer an article of clothing; they are an industry. In the same way Coke has become synonymous with cola, Jockey shorts now mean briefs of any brand, hue or cut, trademark notwithstanding. And because there is no question of their staying power, Howard Cooley, president of Jockey International, says there is no question about their comfort.
”We like to talk about fashion underwear, but the reason people keep buying is fit and comfort,” the 50-year-old executive explains as he sits in his small, unadorned office at the company`s Wisconsin headquarters. ”It doesn`t matter how catchy the name is or how strong the ads are, if the consumers don`t feel comfortable, they`re not going to be back.”
Not only have the buyers returned, they have willingly paid prices often twice that of bargain brands, more proof, says Cooley, that Jockey is top drawer. Of course, the company has spared little and bared a lot to get the message across. Though advertising director Bill Herrmann refuses to disclose the size of his budget, he admits that it has quadrupled since 1979 to keep Palmer`s scantily clad, tanned body on the pages of newspapers and magazines and on posters.
Palmer, 39, wore Jockey briefs as a child. ”My mother bought them,” he says. ”I`ve never asked her why.”
HE CONTINUES to wear them because he is well paid, but also because of a certain respect he has for the product and the people who make it. His first deal with Jockey was consumated with a handshake and the subsequent negotiations, though more formal, have never been hard ball.
”I like the relationship,” he says. ”It`s a nice company. Even when sales are good, they care about the product and want to be better.”
Palmer, too, cares about his image as a spokesman. Once, after pitching a night game in Seattle, he went without sleep to fly to Chicago to make an appearance for Jockey. Whether the three-time Cy Young winner will be remembered more for his athletic prowess or his modeling appeal remains to be seen.
”When I make an appearance for Jockey, there are people who know me as a baseball player and others who know me as a model and have no idea I played baseball,” Palmer says. ”I never kept track of the percentage.”
Depsite his growing celebrity, Palmer has not resorted to disguises to protect himself from an adoring public. ”I just make sure,” he says, ”that I don`t go out in my underwear.”
UNDERWEAR HAS been around several thousand years in one form or another. The Egyptians wore loin cloths beneath skirts in the 25th Century B.C. In medieval times, loose-fitting underpants called ”braies” were produced in different colors and lengths. Full-length tights came along in the 14th Century, but the baggy look dominated the market until the second half of the 19th Century, when outdoor sports, such as bicycling and tennis, led to a demand for underwear sculpted to the body.
During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, men began wearing drawers of pink, lavender and red. Despite this flirtation with color, ”underwear in the first two decades of this century was exactly what the name suggested:
apparel worn underneath outergarments, the sole purpose of which was to protect the wearer from the elements,” according to ”Esquire`s Encyclopedia of 20th Century Men`s Fashions.”
There was the union suit, the popular form-fitting, one-piece number with a button-shut ”trap door” seat. Initially full-length, it later came in a sleeveless unit that ended a few inches above the knees. During World War I men changed to separate undershirts and boxer-type underpants. But the watershed came in 1934, when a Cooper`s vice president named A.R. Kneibler saw a picture from the French Riviera of a man in a swim suit similar to the tank suits still worn by competitive swimmers and vainglorious sunbathers. Something clicked, and the brief was born.
Style 1001 sold for 50 cents and came in a cellophane wrapper. It gave the wearer, according to a 1935 magazine ad, ”scientific suspension” and
”restful buoyancy.” Furthermore, there was ”no exposure” and ”no bulking.” A trade publication called these developments ”sensational news,” for modern man`s underpants had never before crept above mid-thigh except when dragged uncomfortably upward by a pair of tight trousers. The innovation was radical.
IN AN EQUALLY daring marketing move, Cooper`s presented the ”cellophane wedding” at a fashion association meeting in Chicago in 1936. A pair of models, dressed in tuxedo and wedding gown, had half their outer garments cut away and replaced by cellophane to reveal what they were wearing beneath. Thus, the industry`s elite was introduced to Jockey`s patented ”Y” cup construction by a grinning man in a see-through suit. ”It was
. . .” Herrmann pauses, choosing his word carefully, ”. . . different.”
By year`s end it will also be time-tested. To call attention to Jockey briefs` golden anniversary, Herrmann plans to re-create the cellophane wedding at a Men`s Fashion Association meeting Feb. 10 in Atlanta and at a special show in Chicago in May or June.
”The outfits are already made,” he says. ”First, we`ll show underwear from that era. From that we`ll go into an active style show of men`s fashion underwear–bikinis, low rises, colors. Jim Palmer will come onstage and introduce the Jockey For Her line. Then as a finale, we`ll have the cellophane wedding with modern undergarments.”
Those fancy pants have acquired remarkable popularity. Sales of classic white Jockey shorts were up 7.6 percent from 1983 to 1984, but more than half of Jockey International`s sales were in colored fashion briefs, Cooley says. And that seems to be the rule across the board.
CHUCK BEILFUSS has worked more than 20 years in the men`s furnishings department at Carson Pirie Scott & Co. ”Ten or 15 years ago, 90 percent of the people bought white; now, probably 70 percent of them buy colored,” he says, standing near a poster of a man in Calvin Klein briefs lying on a beach. The poster is not too exaggerated. Designer underpants have become stylish beyond recognition. A few weeks ago a man walked onto a crowded beach in Palm Beach, Fla., wearing nothing but a pair of royal blue bikini briefs that his girlfriend had given him for Christmas. Nobody said a word. A few hundred yards away another man stripped down to conventional white briefs and was promptly rousted by police.
Briefs outsell boxer shorts by an overwhelming margin, according to Cooley, whose company is a major manufacturer of boxer shorts, too. Neverthess, even he admits there is no definitive research on men`s or women`s preferences.
”How many men are still wearing Jockey shorts because their mother started them off in them?” asks Maury Levy, who edits Playboy`s Fashion Guide. ”Some men get out on their own and try boxer shorts. Along the way it gets back to what makes sense and what`s comfortable.”
Or what`s less traumatic.
”I went through my peacock period, when I thought it was too straight to wear white briefs” Levy says. ”I went out and bought all these colored shorts. After a while, I adopted the psychology of my mother, who always told me to wear clean underwear without holes in case I got hit by a truck and had to go to the hospital. As I put on a pair of hot pink or purple bikinis, I would think: `What if someone comes into the office today and at gunpoint orders you to drop your pants. Do you want to be caught like this?` ”
PROBABLY THE most scurrilous rumor in underpants lore is the assertion that wearing briefs can lower a man`s sperm count. (”I wear boxers because my doctor advised me to do so as a matter of potency,” a Chicago man says, pointing proudly to pictures of his three children.) The misbegotten notion that briefs can raise the temperature of the testicles to the point of infertility can be traced to a series of old experiments, says Dr. Thomas Jones, an endocrinologist and male fertility specialist at the University of Chicago.
”It has been known for some time that men with undescended testes don`t produce sperm,” he says. ”Some people thought that was because the temperature was higher inside the body.”
So an enterprising turn-of-the-century scientist put woolen pouches on sheep testicles, taped them to the animals` stomachs and discovered diminished sperm production. A researcher at Cornell seized on this finding, Jones says, placed a bunch of men in a steam bath and tested their sperm counts. They were low, he reported. Unfortunately, no one could reproduce his results, not even Cornell, which, Jones says, tried a second time.
”But the negative results didn`t get publicized,” Jones continues,
”and so the first report became the rationale for the Jockey short thing
–that the underwear holds the testicles close to the body and makes them too hot. I hear that from patients all the time. It`s just not medically proven, but I have to treat it delicately. It`s hard to tell someone they just threw out a bunch of good underwear for no good reason.”
It is more difficult to generalize tastes. Writing in ”The Language of Clothes,” Alison Lurie tries to sum things up this way: ”About all that can be said is that middle- and upper-class men over 50 seem to prefer boxer shorts in white, blue or tan, plain or striped. Conservative men under 50 prefer standard white Jockey shorts. Less conservative men, if they have reasonably flat stomachs, may wear low-cut Jockey shorts, sometimes brown, red, green or blue. There are also those who wear no underpants at all–a practice regarded by some women as thrilling, by others as disgusting.
”Most women under 50 seem to like colorful–but not way out–briefs, as long as a man has the figure for them.”
THE WOMEN IN the living room of the Kappa Kappa Gamma house at Northwestern University are all under 50. Yet only one prefers her man in briefs. Each spring these women gather with the brothers of Sigma Alpha Epsilon to celebrate ”The Boxer Rebellion,” an evening of drunken revelry in which participants of both sexes wear boxer shorts.
”Boxers leave more to the imagination,” Cathy Buss says.
”Guys` butts look better in boxers,” adds Kathleen James. ”You don`t have that gnarly upper thigh look.”
Furthermore, colored briefs are ”sleazy” and going without underwear
(”going commando,” as they say on campus) is simply gross.
The boxer-brief battle likely will rage on without resolution until the centennial of Jockey shorts. ”We did some preliminary research for an article about what women want in underwear, and the results were inconclusive,” Levy notes. For men, a consensus is every bit as elusive.
”When you wear Jockey shorts, you have to change every day,” Bob Plaschke, an SAE at Northwestern, explains. ”With boxers I don`t feel like I have to.”
”Someone bought me a pair of boxers once; I felt like I was standing naked in a tent,” counters a 43-year-old devotee of briefs.
”Briefs are for little boys,” another middle-aged man replies.
”When I was a teenager, I had to wear my father`s hand-me-down boxers,” someone else says. ”They looked like mattress ticking and were embarrassing in the locker room. I got out of them as soon as I could.”
Finally, there are those for whom the matter shall remain, well, unmentionable. ”There are three things in this life I will never discuss,” a 47-year-old Chicagoan says, ”my salary, my bowling average and my brand of underwear.”
