Columnist Joe Bennett is puzzled by colourful modern underpants - but he's now embraced the concept.
Columnist Joe Bennett is puzzled by colourful modern underpants - but he's now embraced the concept.
OPINION:
I am puzzled by my choice of underpants. Bear with me.
I still find it indecent that men's underpants are openly on sale. I would prefer them to be sold under darkened wrapper, as condoms used to be by the barber. "Was there anything else today, sir?"
But no,underpants are wantonly displayed in shops so that both men and women can paw them, assess the cloth with a poulterer's pinch of finger and thumb, test the heft of the waistband, the thickness of the doubly protective parts. (I'm sorry if you have not yet breakfasted, but I am here to tell it as it is.)
Time was when underpants were simply and indivisibly underpants.
At infant school, around the time of Napoleon, we used to strip to our undies, boys and girls alike, to do vaguely callisthenic things in the school hall. And if you had looked around the hall as we transformed on instruction from curled up seeds, to seedlings, to plants that stretched for the ceiling - apart that is from the child who remained tightly coiled in the corner of the room refusing to germinate and who later developed some extraordinary psychological issues - you would have seen that every pair of knickers were as white as morning frost.
A few years later when I first started to play club cricket with men - though that, I realise with a shudder, is more than half a century ago - it became clear that men's underpants were also universally white - or at least they had begun life that way. Men wisely gave them little thought. Their underwear was as uniform as blue serge was in communist China.
But we live in the capitalist west and the signature note of capitalism is creating needless needs and then gratifying them. The means of doing so is advertising.
(In the early 80s I travelled a little behind the Iron Curtain. It took me a while to realise that one cause of the sense of drabness was the absence of commercial advertising. "High above the gutter," wrote Larkin, "a silver knife sinks into golden butter". (But not in communist Czechoslovakia, it didn't. All you got there was gutter.)
When advertising first swung its attention onto men's underpants it pulled the usual stunt. It associated the underpants with youth and happiness and sex. Men fell for the fallacy like autumn leaves. Suddenly there were almost as many varieties of underwear for men as there are for women.
The modern trend for colourful underpants has perplexed Joe Bennett - until he discovered some he really likes.
I embraced the coloured underpants but remained a traditionalist in design, favouring what became known as the brief. The new-fangled boxer short, it seemed to me, had design flaws, some of which I shall not go into on the pages of a family newspaper, but one of which was the tendency to ruche and gather. I do not like my underwear to ruche and gather.
I have, however, recently graduated from briefs to trunks. These stretch a little further down the thigh and offer welcome warmth in the cooler months. Whether I shall revert in summer I do not know, nor do I imagine that you greatly care.
A further innovation was the advent of visual designs: pictures of Mickey Mouse or racing cars; waistbands with prominent brand names. The purpose was not clear. Why put images where they would not be seen? It could hardly be to impress potential lovers; if one has reached the underpants stage there is no pausing for aesthetic appreciation.
And yet the use of motifs works. I can testify to it myself, for it is the root of my puzzlement and this column. A couple of years ago I went shopping for underpants and beheld a novelty pack of seven. They were plain and black except for the waistband, each of which was emblazoned with a different day of the week. Reader, I did not hesitate. I bought them on the spot.
I don't know why. I had not reached the stage where I don't know what day of the week it is. And if I had, a set of underpants would be no help. Nor did I mean to wear Monday pants on a Monday. Nor, emphatically, would I want to meet the sort of man who did. And yet I liked the things on sight.
So much so that I have since thrown out all previous underpants and bought two more packs of seven. My underwear drawer is now entirely hebdomadal. Every morning it's a lucky dip. I plunge a hand blindly into the drawer, pull out a day and if it's right I put it back. And the absurdity pleases me.
