Jockey Y-Front Brief

The Y-Front is a pair of men's briefs cut close to the body with no legs at all: a knitted cotton pouch held by an elastic waistband, the leg openings cut high at the hip. Its signature is on the front, where overlapping panels of fabric meet in an inverted Y and form a fly that opens without buttons. In white ribbed cotton it is one of the most familiar garments of the twentieth century, and in Britain its trademark has become the ordinary word for the thing.

It was devised in 1934 at Coopers, an underwear maker in Kenosha, Wisconsin, that the Depression had brought close to bankruptcy. Most men then wore union suits or loose woven shorts. Coopers' designer, Arthur Kneibler, is said to have been prompted by a postcard from the French Riviera showing a man in a very short bathing suit, and he produced a garment that gave the kind of support a jockstrap does. The company named it the Jockey.

It went into the window of Marshall Field's in Chicago on 19 January 1935, the day of a blizzard. The store's managers wanted so wintry a display taken down; before anyone did, more than 600 pairs had sold by noon at fifty cents each. Some 30,000 pairs sold in three months, a patent on the Y-front construction followed that August, and in 1938 the brief crossed to Britain, where shops were soon selling 3,000 pairs a week.

Coopers eventually took the name of its own trademark, becoming Jockey International in 1972, and it is still based in Kenosha. Fashions in men's underwear have since swung to boxer shorts and back again to fitted cuts, and the company now makes many other styles. But the full-rise cotton brief with the Y-shaped fly is still in its catalogue under the name it made famous, and a pair bought today works in the same way as the one in the Chicago window.