Critical Studies in Men's Fashion - New Perspectives on Men’s Underwear, Aug 2022

This article looks at the discursive values of concepts in the homosocial attraction of underwear to men. The Reddit space ‘r/underwear’ is a locale where men can buy and sell underwear from others. Rather than the selling of unused or unwanted products, a principal focus of the space is the selling of used underwear. I examine the discursive elements that occur on the page, and how the sellers work to present the underwear for the presumed purpose of selling them – discussing how these actions reinforce a sense of gender capital. There is a clear provocativeness in the ads, where the purpose is to sell the underwear and demonstrate the masculinity of the seller. Further, the heightened sense of masculinity is provided by the descriptive terms, given the use of concepts such as ‘musky’, ‘sweaty’ and ‘cum’ to reinforce the used nature of the underwear. I speculate that the choice of words serve as a reinforcement of the outward manhood of the seller, relating a ‘tough’ masculinity even though the selling of underwear is a homoerotic venture. I note how there is a sense of ‘selling masculinity’ through the gender capital linked to one’s underwear, adding to conversations of the symbolic value of manhood.

This article shares findings from an exploratory study on the relationship between men’s embodied engagement with underwear and their practices of masculinity. Drawing on wardrobe interviews with nine men and object analyses of their underwear, we investigate how men understand the role of underwear in their lives, how they shift their underwear choices in different social contexts and how they experience their bodies through underwear. Our participants developed emotional bonds with their underwear, but their engagements with these items were restricted by gendered social pressures and boundaries. We argue that men use underwear as ‘manhood acts’ to provide themselves with comfort and confidence to navigate everyday life and, ultimately, shore up and affirm hegemonic masculinity. This article contributes to men’s fashion scholarship on underwear by introducing the context of everyday dress practices to the existing focus on branding and advertising images. We encourage researchers to build upon our study on men’s underwear by engaging participants whose demographics expand beyond our sample of primarily heterosexual, cisgender men who were under 35 years of age.

This article interrogates the positioning of socks as a culturally transgressive garment by football casuals through a case study of the British Sock Fetish Council (BSFC). While most studies contextualize casuals within a discourse of hooliganism and violence, their use of dress as a means of negotiating shared masculine identities remains under-researched. Founded in 2011, the BSFC quickly grew to over 1000 card-carrying members, holding meets at Newcastle, Manchester, Birmingham and London, as well as at football matches throughout the United Kingdom. Within the BSFC, the term ‘fetish’ is not used to denote a sexual predilection by an almost entirely heterosexual community. Instead, it acknowledges the members’ obsession with clothing and highlights the sub-textual tensions inherent in their individual and collective practices. The author was an active participant within the BSFC, witnessing first-hand the community’s development through the online dissemination of highly constructed, self-generated imagery, featuring colourful, patterned socks juxtaposed with rare trainers. This article explores the self-reflexive use of social media to construct group practices and provides insights into how socks were instrumental in establishing consensus on inclusive and hybrid masculine identities within this community.

Romance novels are known for their sexy heroes who grace the covers and pages. This article concerns itself with how heroes are dressed; in particular, I consider the role of men’s underwear in Brief Encounters by Suzanne Forster. Brief Encounters is a Harlequin Romance novel and, more specifically, a Harlequin Blaze. By way of close textual engagement, I show that men’s underwear plays a significant role in the narrative, especially with respect to the construction and representation of sexuality and masculinity. To these ends, I argue that Brief Encounters imagines men’s underwear as being more than functional, but as desirable and erotic. This article thus contributes to scholarship at the intersection of popular culture studies and critical studies of men’s fashion.

This article investigates chanteys (sailing work songs) provided by chantey singer and collector Stan Hugill, contained within Gershon Legman’s unpublished manuscript of erotic folksong. Throughout, I attend to the spectre of underwear and how its absence signifies the loss of power both in terms of erotic action within the songs but also specifically in terms of cultural experiences, present on land, that divested the sailing man of masculine agency and authority. I read underwear as capturing the qualities of castration anxiety identified by Judith Bulter, and the erasure of such coverings, in these songs, forces these figures to haunt the margins of the text, ushering readings of other constraining and castrating realities that attended the sailor. Underwear is the object that stands in the way, binding up and symbolically castrating the male character, rendering him incapable of satisfying his heteronormative duties. Throughout the Victorian era, there were other cultural realities that ‘got in the way’ or impacted the sailor in his presentation of masculine self, and I contend that absent underwear captures such castrating potentials as the change in domestic space, the move from sail to steam power and also the impact of cultural narratives that sometimes barred sailors from gaining employment and meeting their breadwinning expectations.