A strange new piece of men’s apparel went on display in Marshall Field’s department store in downtown Chicago. In 1887 a Boston company had introduced the ‘jockstrap’ to protect ‘jockeys’ riding bicycles — a relatively new invention — along the city’s cobbled streets. Now, in 1935, the ‘Jockey brief’ was introduced by another firm, Coopers Inc., offering the same sort of support to all men, cyclists or not, thanks to the use of a type of elastic (called ‘lastex’) used on the waist and upper thigh. ‘No excess material anywhere,’ boasted one of its advertisement, ‘to creep, bunch, or create bulges.’ A year later, the same company introduced an ‘exclusive’ feature, the iconic Jockey Y-front, with an opening fashioned in the shape of an inverted Y. Men desperate to spend a penny no longer needed to fumble with buttons.
This style of underwear was designed by an ‘apparel engineer’ named Arthur Kneibler, who was inspired not only by jockstraps but also by the style of French briefs, or ‘slips’, he had seen on a postcard. His design was a completely new concept for men, marking a departure from the long, loose undergarments prevalent since the nineteenth century. The Jockeys were displayed on mannequins in the shop window as a January blizzard covered Chicago’s streets. Any doubts about their success were quickly dispelled when 600 pairs—priced at ‘50 cents and up’—sold by the end of the day. Within three months, 30,000 pairs were sold. When the Y-Fronts arrived in Britain in 1938, sales reached 3,000 pairs per week. Men were liberated from their uncomfortable and impractical underwear. As a 1937 advert promised: ‘No bunching, no binding, and no buttons.’
Not only did Kneibler’s invention save millions of men from being ‘squirmers’, it likely saved the company. Founded in 1876, S.T. Cooper & Sons originally produced wool socks for lumberjacks. By 1900, the company began manufacturing undergarments. It flourished until the Great Depression, when it was nearly made bankrupt in 1934. After restructuring under Harry H. Wolf Sr., the company was renamed Coopers Inc., and in 1971 it became Jockey Menswear Inc.
Today, Jockey International, Inc. sells its products—underwear, socks, thermals, sleepwear, sportswear, and loungewear—in over 120 countries. Jockey’s marketing strategy has often focussed on athletes and fit celebrities to emphasise confidence, performance, and style. Over the years, they have hired well-known sportsmen—the Chicago Bulls’ Michael Jordan and baseball players such as Jim Palmer and Steve Lyons—to model their Y-fronts
