A NEW NOTE IN “UNOIES”

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 442, 25 August 1928, Page 26

A NEW NOTE IN “UNOIES”

Ptbbkbly started as a joke, but the world has faken it seriously. UvlriffllfAyl T^Le ® rst ibue you saw red-striped underwear in the men’s furnishings window you passed it with a grin as a good scheme to inveigle you into stopping to look in at the display. But when you go through a great departmental store (writes a Canadian journalist) and see a thirty-foot counter heaped with gorgeous coloured undies for men, silk and linen, mauve and pink, yellow and blue, striped and checked —when every men’s furnishing store has beautiful ensembles of yellow shirts and red trunks as boldly and shamelessly set forth as any women’s lingerie shop—it means only one thing: The men are wearing ’em! Concealed under the drab • grey and blue garments which men affect, you can never tell what gorgeous raiment blushes unseen. The fierce and solemn master of industry who sits sternly in his navy blue suit may be secretly revelling in the embrace of a pink undershirt. The policeman on the beat, -who is the personification of that unembellished beauty which men have celebrated ever since the dawn of the Victorian era, may really be garbed in mauve or violet if the truth were i known. j For when we interviewed some of j | the leading haberdashers as to the i

type of men who were buying this fancy lingerie for themselves we were astounded to hear that it was not the he-sheiks and male flappers who were the chief purchasers, but hemen of the most “he” type. “We sell more forties than thirtyfours,” said the first shop proprietor to display the male lingerie. “Does that suggest male flappers?” “Unless they wear it large and roomy,” we suggested. “No,” said he, “as a matter of fact, the first few sales were to men who bought it as a joke, to create a sensation in the locker room at the golf club or to make a laugh at home. But quite suddenly everybody was buying it. Serious men you would never suspect. Some chaps come in here and fuss and fiddle about for twenty minutes before they work up courage to ask for fancy underwear. And then they buy it with all the guilty manifestations of a boy walking home from school with his first girl. “It seems to satisfy some curious ambition in men. You know, it was only a little more than a century ago since we abandoned the gayest of Georgian fashions in men—velvet and plush, lace and ruffles, and all the colours in the rainbow from canary ■ yellow to plum coloured coats. Is it possible that this style for gay 5 underwear is the beginning—starting from the skin out —of a revulsion j against the past century of drabness ? | The trouble is to have the things