When the temperatures soar into the nineties and the sun beats down relentlessly, there is no better outfit than a pair of fluffy socks and your favorite pair of underwear. Padding around on a cool hardwood floor and finding respite in an air-conditioned oasis, it is possible to find stillness and silence in the heat of summer.
{This was the calm before the Friday Night adventure.}
I think this is my new favorite outfit.
Best part: it doesn’t even need to be ironed.
It is a question that has gorgeously tortured me for all my life, and even the invention of the boxer brief and their current ubiquity has done nothing to dispel the raging debate in my mind (and on my ass).
I certainly like to see a man in briefs, though that rarely happens. Most of the guys I’ve dated or seen in their underwear have favored boxer briefs, including Andy (so it’s pretty much all I’ve seen in the last decade).
Only in photo shoots for gay magazines (or devoted solely to David Beckham) do we ever get to see many men in briefs. Even though most of the gratuitious self-shots I post here would have you thinking I solely a proponent of briefs, the main reason, in my limited experience, is that briefs simply photograph better. Boxers make most of us look like we’re wearing diapers. Baggy diapers. Baggy diapers that need to be changed.
However, I am a big boxer fan. They’re what I wear to bed most nights. They’re also what I wear most weekends when I don’t have to worry about ruining the line of dress pants. Like most things in life, I refuse to have an absolute, and neither should you. Straddle the line. Hang tight or hang loose. Play hard or go home. When did this become a sports ad? And what exactly is being advertised?
(And due to enthusiastically-underwhelming demand, I’ll post some completely underwear-free shots tomorrow, because it can never be said that I’m not a good sport.)
The other evening I ordered about ninety bucks of underwear by John Galliano. I don’t have ninety bucks for food, but sometimes you have to prioritize, and there was a sale on the two pieces I got. (Yes, two for ninety bucks – but that included two-day shipping, and there was no other shipping option.) And really, can you put a price tag or value on happiness?
(By the way, the photo above does not depict the model of underwear I got – those are way too simple.)
I’m a big fan of underwear, and I make it a rule to never leave home without it. However, there comes a time in every man’s life when he must forego his skivvies and, like Brooke Shields in those Calvin Klein ads so many decades ago, do without something between him and his Calvins. Whether it’s from lack of clean laundry, poor luggage packing, or simple forgetfulness, we’ve all had to do without at one point or another. Today was that day for me.
My usual habit is to put whatever I’m going to wear in the bathroom while I take my morning shower (particularly in the winter, when running around naked is not so much fun as it is an episode of Bear Grylls-like Arctic survival – minus the homemade enema and animal dropping appetizers). This includes my underwear (as it is, like my outfits, selected the night before so as to avoid mismatches made in the poor light and mental fatigue of early morning). For whatever reason, the underwear I had selected last night – a simple pair of striped boxer briefs from Banana Republic, in a soft shade of green– did not make it into the bathroom with me this morning.
Sure, I could have walked across the hall and found them, but I didn’t bother. It’s not like I’ve never gone commando before (though it’s usually on a spur-of-the-moment trip to the store or something, not for an entire work day).
It wasn’t a totally disagreeable experience. I was expecting to freeze certain body parts off, but I’m pleased to report that everything is still intact. It was made bearable by the type of pants I had on too – this wouldn’t have worked nearly as well in jeans or wool. As it was, my pants were mostly-cotton, and worn in enough to be softer than most of the regular boxers I wear.
Even so, this isn’t a practice I’m going to continue. I’ve invested too much time, effort, and money into amassing a sizable collection of undergarments to ever give them up. Our Latin teacher had a silly joke that she used to make all the time: Semper Ubi, Sub Ubi. Literal translation: “Always Where, Under Where.” She was so ahead of her time, if a little ridiculous.
