[sebbie]

Speedos, Jockeys, Men and their Bodies

These topics are interrelated. When I was a small child in the early 1950s, practically every guy my age wore cotton briefs but guys wearing brief-style swimwear was uncommon. I read some of the history of the company that became the Speedo that we know as Swim brief as well as the history of the company that invented the Y-Fly brief for men. What I uncovered is quite interesting.

The company that became Speedo started out as a knitting mill in Australia that specialized in making what we would now call full body swimsuits of a knit material for both men and women. Women obviously wore suits that covered their upper body, but so did men. Still, the snug-fitting knitted materials the company made conformed to the body with the idea of reducing drag.

The Cooper company which later became Jockey, made and sold its first Y-front Brief in 1935 at Marshall Fields in Chicago. The Y-front contained a hidden fly. But prior to that, men’s underwear was much larger and bulkier, perhaps a one-piece suit not that unlike what male swimmers of the time were wearing. The name Jockey was chosen because the new underwear design provided support like a jockstrap. The success of the Jockey brief was so great that the Cooper Company was soon renamed the Jockey Company.

I have been making an effort to determine exactly when the nylon Speedo swim brief first appeared. The date I keep coming back to is the 1956 Olympics held in Melbourne Australia, where the winning Australian swim team wore the Speedo nylon swim briefs for the very first time in a very high profile setting. The great success of the swimmers on that team got everyone thinking did those skimpy nylon suits have anything to do with their performance. And, of course the suits they were wearing were very different from those worn by men’s teams in past Olympic and other high-profile men’s swimming events. Soon, nearly every competitive swimmer was appearing for the event in a Speedo.

By 1956, a lot more companies were making cotton briefs for guys than Jockey. Nearly every men’s underwear manufacturer was making men’s cotton briefs for the mass market, and these were selling well. Boys paid attention to what their dads were wearing, and a wide variety of manufacturers had similar designs in boys' sizes, By the mid 1950s, the cotton brief was by far the most common underwear design for men and boys. Interestingly, Speedo became a distributor for Jockey brand underwear in Australia.

I am trying to remember the exact year my cousin visited from the west coast and showed up at the lake wearing a blue swim brief. He had been taking swimming lessons at his school, and, for some places, participating in swimming required wearing a swim brief. I am thinking that this would have likely been 1957 or perhaps 1958. He clearly loved the blue swim brief, and refused to take it off when he got out of the water. Indeed, when he put his jeans back on, he wore the brief as if it were a pair of colorful underwear. He even slept in it. I knew at the time he was on to something, but unfortunately, I did not have a swim brief nor any excuse to get one.

In reading the history of the Jockey company, I discovered that Jockey introduced the No-fly “Skantz” brief in 1958. These briefs not only lacked a fly, they were modeled after a woman’s bikini bottom—skimpy sides and minimal but stretchy (Lycra infused) fabric. Speedos as worn by the male swim team at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics has opened the door to the idea that a guy could be seen in a skimpier brief made of something other than white cotton and still be considered a real male. But they also tapped into what my cousin had discovered that many swim briefs also make excellent daily underwear.

The bikini-style briefs turned out to be a hit for Jockey—a design marketed as a type of underwear but based on the idea that the fabrics used in a swim brief could be made into underwear. Guys loved the fit and feel of the skimpy and body-conforming new briefs.