From Federico Escobar, this wonderful quote from Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis (2003):
Eric watched them cross the street, stunted humans in the shadow of the underwear gods that adorned the soaring billboards. These were figures beyond gender and procreation, enchanted women in men’s shorts, beyond commerce, even, men immortal in their muscle tone, in the clustered bulge at the crotchline. (p. 84)
I got this in my role as Underwear Guy, a sideline career that I seem to have stumbled into back in 2005. Some linguablog discussions of categories and terms in the domain of clothing, mostly men’s clothing, mostly underwear and related items (heavy homo-content in many of my postings):
AZ on LLog, 3/19/05: Tidy-whiteys (link)
ML on LLog, 3/20/05: Raising and lowering those tighty whities (link)
AZ on LLog, 3/20/05: Tighty-whities: the semantics (link)
AZ on LLog, 3/27/05: Underwear sociolinguistics (link)
AZBlog, 9/23/09: Lifting shirts (link)
AZBlog, 11/27/09: Hybrid underwear (link)
AZBlog, 4/29/10: What IS that garment? (link) [on the “swim brief”]
AZBlog, 5/1/10: DEFINE “SCRIMMAGE T-SHIRT” (link)
AZBlog, 5/2/10: Wife beaters (link)
AZBlog, 5/13/10: Short shot #47: underwear models (link)
AZBlog, 7/1/10: Golden State Rufskin tit (link)
AZBlog, 7/27/10: Collage essays: from concealment to display (link)
AZBlogX, 8/2/10: Five from 2005: XXX-rated collages (link) [collage “Exposure” on shirt-lifting]
AZBlogX, 8/14/10: Pits ’n’ Tits: five underwear models (link)
AZBlogX, 8/15/10: From 10percent 8/15/10 (link)
AZBlogX, 8/16/10: Hi-def (link)
AZBlogX, 8/16/10: The triad: jockstrap, locker room, shower room (link)
AZBlogX, 8/18/10: Hommage à Rusty (link)
AZBlog, 8/21/10: Return to rainbow flagwear (link)
AZBlog, 9/17/10: Update: an endnote on shirt-lifting (link)
“Five underwear models” has illustrations of some underwear gods, including the first Top God, Mark Wahlberg.
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