Underwear Day
<p>On 5 August 2003, the New York online retailer Freshpair sent models in nothing but their underwear into some of the busiest spots in Manhattan, including Times Square, City Hall and the area around the New York Stock Exchange, to launch what it called National Underwear Day. It was a publicity stunt, openly so, but it was also pitched from the start as a body-positivity campaign, and it caught on. Two decades later the date is marked far beyond New York, and beneath the cheek of it sits a genuinely long story: humans have been dressing from the inside out for more than five thousand years.</p>
<h2 id="the-oldest-underwear-in-the-world">The oldest underwear in the world</h2><div class="ad-unit ad-in-article" aria-label="Advertisement">
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<p>The earliest documented underwear belongs to a man who died around 3300 BC. When the frozen body known as Ötzi the Iceman emerged from a melting Alpine glacier on the Italian-Austrian border in 1991, he was found wearing a leather loincloth beneath his outer clothing, strips of hide stitched together and worn between the legs, held up by a belt. That makes Ötzi’s loincloth the oldest surviving evidence of men’s underwear, a 5,300-year-old answer to a question every culture has had to solve.</p>
<p>The loincloth, in dozens of regional forms, remained the default undergarment across much of the world for millennia. Ancient Egyptian art and surviving textiles show wrapped and knotted linen worn beneath the outer garment, and the Romans had the <em>subligaculum</em>, a loincloth worn by labourers, soldiers, gladiators and athletes alike. A famous fourth-century mosaic at the Villa Romana del Casale in Piazza Armerina, Sicily, shows young women exercising in what look startlingly like two-piece swimsuits, the <em>subligaculum</em> paired with a <em>strophium</em> breast-band, proof that the basic architecture of underwear is very old indeed.</p>
<h2 id="from-the-corset-to-elastic">From the corset to elastic</h2>
<p>From roughly the sixteenth century onwards, women’s underclothing in Europe moved in the opposite direction to comfort. The corset, stiffened with whalebone or steel, reshaped the body to fashionable ideals and was a daily fact of life for respectable women well into the nineteenth century, layered over a shift and beneath petticoats. The story of modern underwear is largely the story of escaping all that: the gradual abandonment of rigid stays in favour of soft, flexible garments tracked the wider loosening of constraints on women’s lives in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.</p>
<p>The decisive technical changes were chemical and mechanical. The development of reliable elastic and, in the twentieth century, of synthetic and knitted stretch fabrics turned underwear from something stiff, layered and laundered with difficulty into the soft, close-fitting, washable garment now taken for granted. The brassiere as a recognisably modern item emerged in the early twentieth century as the corset receded, and men’s briefs and boxers settled into their familiar forms over the same decades.</p>
<p>A few specific moments stand out in that transformation. In 1914 the New York socialite Mary Phelps Jacob patented a backless brassiere fashioned from two handkerchiefs and ribbon, an early step in the corset’s long retreat. Men’s underwear had its own landmark on 19 January 1935, when the Chicago company Coopers put the first modern brief, the “Jockey”, on sale at the Marshall Field’s department store; despite a blizzard raging outside the window display, all 600 pairs sold on the first day, and Marshall Field’s reportedly shifted some 30,000 over the following three months. The brand name became so dominant that, like Hoover for vacuum cleaners, it slid into ordinary speech as a generic word. These were not just fashion shifts but the points at which underwear became an industry, mass-produced, branded and advertised in ways that would eventually make a marketing-led holiday like this one possible.</p>
<h2 id="why-the-day-matters">Why the day matters</h2><div class="ad-unit ad-in-article" aria-label="Advertisement">
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<p>Freshpair attached body positivity to the day deliberately, and the choice has proved durable because underwear is the most intimate point of contact between a person and the impossible bodies of advertising. A day that puts ordinary people, of every size, age and shape, into the same garments the billboards sell makes a quiet argument: that comfort and confidence are not the preserve of the photogenic few. In 2013, more than 800 people of all ages gathered in Times Square in their underwear to attempt a Guinness World Record, which captured the campaign’s spirit better than any slogan.</p>
<p>There is also a plainer case for noticing underwear, which is that it does unglamorous but real work for hygiene and comfort every single day, and is almost never thought about until it fails to do it.</p>
<p>The garment also carries a surprising amount of cultural and even superstitious weight, which a day in its honour brings to the surface. In Italy and several Latin American countries, wearing red underwear on New Year’s Eve is a widespread custom said to bring luck and love in the year ahead, and in some traditions the colour worn is meant to be a gift rather than self-bought. Bolivians and others extend the idea, with yellow underwear worn for prosperity. These small rituals are a reminder that even the most utilitarian garment becomes, in human hands, a vessel for hope and meaning, worn for reasons that have nothing to do with hygiene and everything to do with how people face an uncertain future.</p>
<h2 id="a-garment-people-forget-to-give">A garment people forget to give</h2>
<p>One of the more useful traditions to attach itself to the day is charitable. New underwear is among the most-requested and least-donated items at homeless shelters and food banks, precisely because people happily give away old coats and jumpers but rarely think to buy and donate new pants and socks, which for hygiene reasons must be new. Several charities specifically appeal for them. A day that draws attention to underwear is a natural prompt to fill that gap, turning a frivolous-sounding occasion into something genuinely practical for people in need.</p>
<p>The dignity dimension here is easy to underestimate. For someone sleeping rough or fleeing home with nothing, clean underwear is not a luxury but a foundation of feeling human, bound up with hygiene, health and self-respect in a way that few other garments are. It is the item people are most embarrassed to ask for and most rarely given, which is exactly why the appeals exist. Framing 5 August around generosity rather than spectacle gives an otherwise lightweight holiday a genuine point, and quietly answers the obvious objection that an underwear day is faintly silly: the silliness is the hook, and the donation drive is what it hooks people into.</p>
<h2 id="how-it-is-celebrated">How it is celebrated</h2>
<p>In keeping with its origins, the day is marked with humour. Retailers run promotions; some people use it as a cue to clear out the worn-out drawer and treat themselves to something new; body-positivity advocates use it to spread encouraging messages; and the organisers have over the years staged runway shows, pop-up shops and mass giveaways in New York. For most people who notice it at all, it is simply a moment to appreciate a wardrobe staple that otherwise goes entirely unremarked, a low-key counterpart to other affectionate single-object observances such as <a href="/specialdate/us-national-guacamole-day/">Guacamole Day</a> and even its spicier sibling, <a href="/specialdate/us-national-spicy-guacamole-day/">Spicy Guacamole Day</a>.</p>
<p>The body-positivity angle has aged better than many a corporate campaign, partly because the underwear industry itself has shifted to meet it. Brands that once sold a single idealised silhouette now compete on inclusivity, offering far wider size ranges, adaptive designs for people with disabilities, and marketing that features bodies of every shape and age rather than a narrow few. Some of this is commerce dressed as conscience, certainly, but the net effect on what is actually available in shops has been real: a person who would once have struggled to find underwear that fitted and flattered now has options that did not exist when the day was founded in 2003. A holiday that began with conventionally beautiful models in Times Square has, oddly, helped make room for everyone else.</p>
<h2 id="fun-facts">Fun facts</h2>
<ul>
<li>The oldest known underwear is the leather loincloth worn by Ötzi the Iceman, who died around 3300 BC and was found preserved in an Alpine glacier in 1991.</li>
<li>National Underwear Day was created in 2003 by the New York retailer Freshpair, with models walking through Times Square and past the Stock Exchange.</li>
<li>A fourth-century Roman mosaic at the Villa Romana del Casale in Sicily depicts women exercising in two-piece outfits that look remarkably like modern bikinis.</li>
<li>Steel and whalebone corset stays were so much a part of nineteenth-century manufacturing that surplus corset steel is part of the folklore of other inventions, including the umbrella.</li>
<li>New underwear is one of the most needed and least donated items at shelters, because it generally must be donated unworn, which is why several charities appeal for it specifically.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="a-closing-reflection">A closing reflection</h2>
<p>It is telling that the most private garment we own has the oldest continuous history of any clothing we wear, older than tailoring, older than buttons, going back to a man frozen in a glacier before the pyramids were built. Underwear sits at the join between two things that rarely meet: it is utterly ordinary, and it is the layer closest to how we actually feel in our own skin. A day that began as a retailer’s stunt in Times Square has, almost by accident, ended up pointing at something real, that the foundation of feeling at ease in the world is often invisible, taken for granted, and worth occasionally being grateful for, ideally while remembering to buy a spare pair for someone who has none.</p>
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