80 YEARS OF THE Y-FRONT® DESPITE BEING OUTLAWED AND BATTLING THE BOXER SHORT, JOCKEY CELEBRATES 2014 ANNIVERSARY
Y-fronts: plural noun UK TRADEMARK A piece of underwear for men and boys, covering the area between the waist and the tops of the legs,
which have an opening at the front which is the shape of an upside-down Y
Jockey, one of the biggest selling underwear brands in the world, is this year celebrating 80 years of the classic men’s pant – Y-Front®
More than half a milllion of the Y-Front®’s are expected to be given as gifts in the UK this Christmas, according to Jockey sales.
The original and the best, the Y-Front® or as it was originally known, the Jockey brief, was born in 1934 when Arthur Kneibler, vice president of marketing at Coopers, Inc. (as Jockey was then called), was inspired by a picture of a man in a sleek, supportive swimsuit and drove the company’s design team to create a unusual, new kind of underwear called “the brief”.
Since then, the Y-Front® has become a legend in its own lifetime. It’s been banned for being too skimpy, survived the recession to outsell its more glamorous cousin – the boxer short, and has become a Christmas staple across the world for men of all ages.
For men living in Norwich and Ipswich there really is no alternative – the Y-Front® is undisputed undies king in East Anglia, though still sells incredibly well right across the UK.
In fact, during the recession, the Y-Front® even took on and beat its more glamorous, showbiz cousin – the boxer short. Sales of Y-Front® increased by 35% in 2009, according to the retailer Debenhams. Indeed, in March 2009, Y-Front® outsold boxer shorts for the first time since the early 1990s – the last time when Britain was in recession.
Three years earlier, in 2006, a pair of 37-year-old cotton Y-fronts were sold in the UK, on eBay for £127. A second pair sold for £90 to a buyer in Hong Kong.
Unlike any underwear, when it was first introduced in Winter 1934, the Y-Front® provided men with “masculine support”, available at that time only through the use of an athletic supporter, sometimes called a “jock strap”. To discretely describe the function of the new-fangled underwear, it was called the Jockey (JOCK-ey) brief.
This design was to change the world’s underwear beyond recognition and was so cutting edge that the first patterns were developed in collaboration with a urologist and underwent extensive testing before being approved for production.
The Y-Front® first became widely popular when managers at the Marshall Field store in Chicago banned it from a window display, saying it was ridiculous to flaunt such a skimpy design in the middle of winter. Before the display could be removed, 600 had been sold and perhaps the most iconic piece of male underwear had begun its career.
In 1948 every male athlete in the British Olympic team was given a free pair of Y-Fronts.
The Y-Front® then became regarded as ‘sexy’ thanks to the poses of virile-looking men in advertisements. Indeed the Nick Kamen Levi’s commercial, in which the model strips to his underwear in a laundrette, would have featured the model in a pair of Y-Front® if advertising censors had not decreed them indecent.
As retro brands and styles – from the Mini to vinyl records – continue to feed a wave of nostalgia for classic products, the iconic design of the Classic Y-Front® continues to appeal to fashion conscious men the world over, 80 years after they changed the underwear market for ever.
Did you know….
The Classic Jockey Y-Front® are available in white, black, blue and grey.
