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Wednesday, June 2, 2021

Skimpy undies


I hope Calorman comes along soon and tells us about the interesting 
skimpy underwear in this photo of two unknown (to me, anyway) models.

 

7 comments:

  1. Are skimpy skivvies still "in?"

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  2. A male full-frontal photograph is of course no indication of its age, but it seems that from many images in this (excellent) series, Crowther was working on the cusp of the end of the posing strap era. I have to admit to my shame that the name does not ring a bell, but Capital Studios does and I have a few shots of Ronnie Mills - featured below - wearing a narrow pair of Jockey Skants, which places the photograph, along with the hair, post 1963 to the mid-Sixties. The 19550s saw a huge increase in full and briefer men's bikini briefs which were for private consumption. Jockey Skants - launched in 1958 - were the exception, because of its effective marketing as the first "sports brief" gave carte blanche for the big, the bad and ugly to strut their stuff as well. Jockey made the original cut much briefer in 1963 to cater to the demand for increasingly brief male underwear. There was of course no world-wide-wonder-web and your local "gay store" - there used to be one in San Francisco called "Does Your Mother Know?" - didn't exist, and so all sorts of mail-order businesses opened, advertising in appropriate reader-orientated publications in the classifieds, usually at the back. With legalization, they went public and took to full-page advertising in the many gay magazines that then proliferated. I have never seen this image before, but the briefs seem absolutely typical of such a mail-order manufacturer, targeting principally the gay market, with perhaps one or two bodybuilders who knew they also appealed to the emerging gay market at a time when burgeoning gay erotic photography and even illegal porn were separating from the strict bodybuilding scene with its own publications. They seem to be made of Nylon, which was increasingly used in the 1950s as manufacture became cheaper and as a market response to the lack of cotton, the cotton industry retracting considerably in the war and post-war years, as a result of the considerable manpower needed for harvesting being diverted to heavy industrial work. I'm sorry to write in such vague and general terms, but I doubt, now, even historical evidence for their provenance without knowing the name and location of the manufacturer.

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    Replies
    1. Thanks for the model identification and the detailed information on 1950s men's underwear. It's quite interesting.

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    2. Thanks. This is really interesting and helpful.

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  3. I was hoping to see model names as I thought I knew them. I don't see any previous comment with their names. The guy on the left is Parrish Ames and the guy on the right is Dave Allen.

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  4. I should clarify, the Dave Allen is a different one to the other post in this series (whom Albert of the bum brigade would like).

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    Replies
    1. Thanks for the identifications and the clarification.

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