Ken Callicott messaged me on Facebook to say that he’d come across the men’s underwear term T-bar (or t-bar), which was new to him (and to me), though the metaphor (as in t-shirt, based on the appearance of the letter T) isn’t hard to puzzle out.
Archive for the ‘Language of clothing’ Category
T-bars
May 14, 2012Wrapping it up
January 14, 2012From Max Vasilatos on Facebook, this impractical but entertaining piece of men’s underwear:
Zakk Present Boxer Brief, men’s underwear (sort of) Low rise forest green [which looks really black in the photo] stretch velvet “Present” short boxer brief with red bow detail. What a great package! Perfect gift idea for men under $30.00
Another play on package, as in many other underwear ads.
For much loucher underwear, see my recent XBlog posting on Mien men (not for the kiddies or the modest, not safe for work).
[Addendum January 15th: A bonus in the text is the attachment ambiguity in
Perfect gift idea for men under $30
— where the intended attachment of under $30 is high, modifying gift idea for men, while the NP is likely to be understood as having low attachment, with under $30 parsed as a postmodifier of men. This possibility has led to some banter on Facebook, along the lines of “I’m easy, but I’m not that cheap”.]
pornwear
December 25, 2011In my many postings on (mostly men’s) underwear, there’s a theme about underwear that’s not really credible as functional underclothing; it’s for displaying the body and exciting the viewer, and you’d expect it to be worn with as few other, possibly distracting or concealing, garments as possible. I’ve come to talk about these items of apparel as pornwear. (The term has been used by others, but with reference to clothing that merely accentuates the sexy bits or comes with racy images or slogans. Pornwear, in my sense, has no real function beyond erotic display, as crudely as possible.)
The people at Titan Media have taken pornwear to new heights, to garments that you can’t imagine being worn under anything — while blatantly showing off cocks (or asses). This stuff goes beond totally revealing leather (though Titan specializes in that too). It’s pure pornwear. On my X blog today, a posting about a recent Titan flick that clothes most of its cast in pure pornwear, with links to three earlier postings in the same vein, plus an extra shot of pornstar Spencer Reed in a shiny black vinyl pornwear number.
Very much not for the kiddies.
Puma in pink
November 30, 2011It’s been a while since I posted on men’s underwear and its gay subtexts, so now (via Will Parsons) this notable Puma ProTech Jock Strap from Macy’s, available in three neon colors:
The model also provides an excellent illustration of the inguinal ligament, discussed here.
Bathing costume
July 13, 2011Following on my posting, on my X blog, of a moose-knuckle singlet (here) and a remarkable letting-it-all-hang-out singlet (here), Aric Olnes reported on Facebook that he’d just bought a singlet for himself, adding:
I settled for the singlet, since I couldn’t find a reproduction Victorian male swimsuit with horizontal stripes.
with a photo of this excellent bathing costume (I don’t think they were called swimsuits in Victorian times):
Entirely decorous, so unlike most of the men’s clothing I post about. And the socks are fabulous.
OED2 has relevant compounds with bathing as first element from the 18th and 19th centuries:
bathing dress (with dress ‘costume’) 1774, bathing costume from the 1830s, bathing-suit 1873, bathing trunks 1895
but swimming and swim compounds are a 20th century thing:
swimming costume 1904, swimming suit 1926 (in Hemingway), swimsuit (glossed as ‘a (woman’s) bathing costume’) 1934, swim-wear 1935, swimming trunks 1943, swim-trunks 1959
Active bottoms
July 11, 2011Passed on by a friend on Facebook, this sign from a Ross Dress for Less store:
Readers who are familiar with the gay use of bottom and top to describe roles in sexual encounters — see my discussion of “power bottoms” here — and also with the sexual use of active and passive will be amused at the combination of the two.
But that of course wasn’t what the Ross people had in mind.
Arts and crafts in the mail
June 18, 2011Readers who know my interests are given to sending me links to oddities I might not otherwise have come across. Two recently: from Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky, for a men’s underwear posting on a men’s sewing blog; and from Mark Mandel, with an X-rated cake.
Package vocabulary
June 14, 2011Just posted on my X blog: “Today’s remarkable underwear”, with more ways of referring to a man’s genitals. In a description of Pulse mesh underwear:
A perfect men’s underwear pick for those who like to show off the goods.
Then in a description of Male Power’s Super Sock:
It’s not a jock (there are no legstraps), it’s not a thong (there is no butt strap), just a waistband and pouch that holds your boys.
And, most indirectly of all, in a description of the Good Devil Suspend Pouch:
A perfect pouch that covers the essential areas and holds everything in place …
The marmaxi
May 24, 2011Today’s Rhymes With Orange:
A marmaxi is a giant martini — the word resulting from a playful reanalysis of martini as mar + tini (though the Martini of Martini e Rossi, the vermouth makers, is an Italian patronymic from the personal name Martino, i.e. Martin, so that historically martin is a unit). Compare the martini variants the appletini and the okratini, portmanteaus in which the -tini is contributed by martini.
Underwear linguistics: shapewear
March 27, 2011In the March 28 New Yorker, Alexandra Jacobs takes a romp in the world of shapewear (more staidly known as foundation garments), mostly for women: in the Annals of Retail, “Smooth Moves” (“How Sara Blakely rehabilitated the girdle”). A recurrent theme in the piece is the naming of these garments.