BACK WORDS
Whatever the story, anecdote, fictitious tale, rant, cultural observation or Club commentary, now’s your chance to take it to the world…well, Membership, anyway. E-mail your submission (no more than 700 words) to editor@tac-club.org.
The Evolution of Underwear by Dave McCaughan
I
t’s amazing how interested people are in my underwear. Well, maybe not in the pairs I wear, but they are interested in the stories I tell about men’s underwear. Around 20 years ago, I had the idea of using men’s underwear to explain how a category of products and brands changes in response to seemingly unrelated scientific advancements and social trends. It’s a subject most people don’t think much about, but for some reason nothing gets people laughing like watching a middle-aged man strip to his underwear while talking about boxers and briefs. As it happens, “make your audience laugh” is the first rule of good presenting. “Women wear lingerie and men simply put on underwear” is my favorite quote on the subject but it’s an unfair one because while a man’s choice of underwear says a lot about him, it was probably chosen by his wife or mother. In fact, 70 percent of men’s underwear is bought by women.
Underwear was initially developed for simple protection from what I call “roughage and leakage” and evolved with the advent of the spinning jenny and Manchester cotton mills in the late 1700s, the washing machine, the pill, women’s liberation and men’s fantasies that followed in the swinging 60s. Even a saying from the 1920s about not wanting your son or husband in an accident in dirty underwear had an effect on what men wore. Then there’s Hollywood. When Clark Gable became the first movie star to take off his shirt to reveal no undershirt in 1934’s It Happened One Night, sales of that garment plummeted. And when Tom Cruise famously danced around the house in 1983’s Risky Business, tighty-whities took off. Of course, each culture has its underwear traditions. In the last few years, the fundoshi loincloth, which tends to be on show in abundance at summer festivals, has become popular with young Japanese. The rokushaku, for example, looks a bit like a G-string for men. But Japanese manufacturers are producing some of the most technologically advanced underwear in the world. There are now briefs that cool you down, warm you up, absorb sweat, deodorize and even help you burn calories as you wear them. Who says men’s underwear can’t be interesting? o Club Member McCaughan is director of strategic planning with the advertising agency McCann Worldgroup Asia-Pacific.
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www.gabriela.jp 48 November 2013 iNTOUCH