Bonds Chesty Singlet

The Chesty is a man's singlet: a close-fitting, sleeveless vest of ribbed cotton with a deep scooped neck and broad shoulder straps, knitted in a tube so that there is no seam down the sides. It is made in white above all, also in grey, black and navy. In Australia, where it is usually called simply a Chesty or a Bonds singlet, it has been worn as underwear, as sportswear and, in the heat, as the working man's outer garment.

Its maker was founded in Sydney in 1915 by George Allan Bond, an American who imported women's stockings and gloves before beginning to manufacture hosiery and then, from 1918, underwear at Camperdown. Bonds dates the first Men's Athletic Singlet to 1920. In 1923 Bond opened a spinning mill at Wentworthville, west of the city, and a railway station and suburb, Pendle Hill, grew up around it.

The singlet's fame came from advertising. From 1936 Bonds sold the Athletic with cartoons, and on 19 March 1940 the artist Syd Miller and the copywriter Ted Moloney introduced Chesty Bond in Sydney's Sun: a likeable, heroic young man, made super whenever he wore his Bond's Athletic. His jutting chin was borrowed, Wikipedia records, from the jaw of Jack Lang, the Depression-era Premier of New South Wales, beloved of cartoonists. Within two years the strip was appearing daily, possibly the first daily advertising comic strip anywhere. The strip ran for twenty-three years, through the war, when Chesty fought the Japanese and took Hitler prisoner, and the singlet took the hero's name.

Bonds counted 100 million Chestys sold by 1972 and 250 million by 1990. Manufacture left Australia in 2010, and the company now belongs to the Canadian maker Gildan, but the singlet remains the same simple ribbed garment, side-seamfree, and the cartoon hero, chin and all, still appears on the packet.