Underwear

Rating:
Summary: Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Men's Underwear
Review: This little well-packaged (forgive the pun) book will provide practically all the information you'll ever need or want to know on the subject of men's underwear. The writer gives the history of underwear, beginning with the ancient Egyptians and Greeks and bringing us up to the 21st Century. She gives the gay liberation movement credit for changing the attitudes about men's underwear. There are chapters on the brief, long underwear, boxers, the thong and jock strap-- all well illustrated mostly with color photographs of closeups of crotches--and a chapter on the different brands of men's underwear. Of course, Ms. Engel discusses Jockey and Calvin Klein here. The Jockey Company is famous for inventing the Y-front brief in 1935, and Calvin Klein with help from photographers like Bruce Weber gave us the anatomically correct hunks in skintight white briefs with his name on the waistband in the 1980's.

There are photographs throughout the book of the same three men in different styles of underwear. I would have preferred to see more of them-- well, we do get to see all of them on the inside back page. (After all, the crotch does have a body. Even in the catalogue International Male, we see more of the men's bodies than just their crotches in the underwear ads.) Ditto for the 90 or so tiny photographs of these three men near the end of the book. If some of these shots had been blown up to a larger size, the book would have been much more interesting. Ditto the Keith Haring photo (p. 124), the soccor players (pp.8-9), and "Jockey's Cellophane Wedding" on pages 20 and 21. More photographs like these would have made for a better book. Finally, there are all kinds of tips on washing underwear and getting those "stubbor stains" out. I'm not kidding.

UNDERWEAR is certainly a clever little book, too small for your coffee table, but maybe a nice addition for your nightstand.