A thirty-year jump in time – a straw – and here we are all back in the early 1990s, a strange period when two schools of virility competed for the imagination of adolescents with “4 × 3” and screens advertisers.
On the one hand, there are Levi’s spots, which Christian “Badoumba” Blachas and the whole team of the M6 show “Culture pub” will teach us to find brilliant. American-facing advertisements of gas station attendants dripping with sweat, swarming with “carnival Marlon Brando” and “train station platform GIs”, white boxer shorts under 501 very high waists.
To this fifties imaginary of the bad guy and the good bad guy is opposed that of the dirty guy and future showerbag (slang insult made in the USA), with Mark Wahlberg as the leader of a champion’s masculinity, proud of his chocolate bars, his Calvin Klein branded boxers and his content which he defends as his homeland and touches with love in front of Herb Ritts’ lens.
Chic type underwear
The exposed boxer shorts and muscles are a hip-hop look that comes from the streets, gangs and gangsta rap stars, like Tupac Shakur (aka 2Pac). Its origin is multiple, a sort of pile-up between the already very baggy proportions of the suits worn in the 1940s by followers of the zoot subculture, the original streetwear (tattoos and loose clothing to conceal weapons), and, finally, it also serves as a sign of recognition between ex-convicts and crime sympathizers. Indeed, it is in prison that, deprived of a belt, it is easier to lose your pants, thus leaving your underwear in full view of everyone.
During the XXIand century, these two rock and gang worlds will merge, the stars of rap or international variety, like Travis Scott or Justin Bieber, as far as France with Booba, combining pectorals, abs, tattoos, branded boxers and tight low waist Ramones way. Or how the crappy appearance of regulars at CBGB, this mythical club in New York with an avant-garde spirit, collided with that of the Stakhanovites at CMG (Club Med Gym).
All of this obviously runs in the metaverse of youth and celebrity. In a world with wiser, more controlled clothing habits, we look at all this with distance and envy. Too difficult to fit in, boxer briefs and their apparent elastic are abandoned in favor of cute white, baby blue or fancy boxer shorts, the chic type of underwear that you leave hanging out of your pants on days off. Through this sensual gesture, the man of today takes his place in the second ring of a community of solid guys, self-proclaimed war machines, whose imaginations are threadbare.
