“Feel Like a Million!”: The Propitious Epoch in Men's Underwear Imagery, 1939–1952

"Feel like a million]" crowed Jockey underwear advertising after World War II. This triumphant post-War advertising for men's underwear may serve to indicate the place of underwear in the modern imagination. It is chaste all-American illustrational reserve in the five small illustrations in the mirror on the right we see distinct black-edged outline with clothing flat and white. This jubilant image breaks no boundary of etiquette, though its exuberant enthusiasm for underwear may begin to betoken a changed view of men's underwear. The 1950 advertising copy reads in part: "Look for the mark, 'Y-Front,' on the garment--it's your assurance that you're getting the famous Coopers product--and one of the many reasons why Jockey gives you a real lift. See your dealer soon--be 'Hip-Taped' for perfect fit. Then do as millions do--feel like a million in Jockey brand underwear]" Even as advanced as this advertising may appear to be, it continues to present a conventional manner of buying men's underwear that raises critical issues of a conventional consumer product, its placement at point of purchase, and our apprehension of the product through advertising, point of purchase circumstance, and our satisfactions on consumer fulfillment. The 1950 advertisement is still advising the client that he will see a dealer and be measured for underwear. Since the late 1930s, Coopers/Jockey had been producing men's underwear in cellophane packaging, thus with the option of self-service at the counter, but that idea was clearly only beginning to obtain in 1950. The man or woman buying men's underwear expected to see a salesperson, if only for this activity to be "hip-taped." By 1946, Coopers/Jockey was regularly employing its "feel like a million]" slogan, but the ethos of this campaign was akin to much of men's underwear advertising. We move from qualification to celebration in the years from ca. 1900 to the "feel like a million]" example in 1950. In a 1952 advertisement for Hanes Underwear, television performers Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca are recruited to the cause of selling men's underwear, though again still abetted by illustrations, indispensable to the demonstration of flex and comfort that underwear needs. The copy for the ad is patently ridiculous, the photographic image tendentiously justified by the copy "Give your eye teeth to be sitting pretty? There's an easier way--painless, too. Sit down in Hanes Fig Leaf briefs. Double panel seat. Knit from soft, lustrous cotton. Live elastic in waistband and leg openings." While both "lustrous cotton" and "live elastic" may be slightly hyperbolic, the advertisement works primarily through celebrity endorsement, though one might wonder if the dancing scenes with underwear held high above tangos and contortions are warranted, especially inasmuch as Caesar and Coca were not married. In fact, the effect is again to cheer and to make comic and light, even when reaching for farfetched cliches regarding garment quality. In 1939, Peter Pfarr, an employee of Coopers, the makers of Jockey Brand underwear, developed for Coopers a table-top dispenser that allowed the customer to pick the underwear. What had previously been a ritual of the salesclerk finding the right garment and size in a product stored behind the counter was now placed at fingertip access to the consumer. To the moment of Coopers self-service initiative in packaging and display, which really had its impact in the post-War years, undergarments had been dispensed with the same ceremony as outergarments. Unlike the multiple measurements required to determine size for most union suits of earlier years, the brief was selected by hip size alone. But Pfarr's invention was no mere Automat: the recognition that the consumer could buy with surety and convenience meant that men's underwear effectively became a different commodity because of its transformed point-of-purchase distribution. Until late in the 20th century, intimate apparel for women remained intimate and personal at retail, involving exchange among women and the bad, but abiding, gender joke of men intimidated by lingerie departments. …