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It’s followed by the slightly more flattering Ultimate Dyed Boxer Brief (no. 4 overall), which is designed to cover up even the slightest hint of genitalia. On Amazon, Hanes’s best-selling line is the Tagless Tartan Boxer (no.
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Hanes’s products look like men’s underwear has for decades-garments so massive they could be hoisted like a flag on a cruise ship. The company has continued to lag behind Hanes in sales, which reported record numbers in 2015: It raked in $5.73 billion around the globe. In 2014, the company earned nearly $3 billion in total revenue-while the boxer briefs Wahlberg popularized remain its biggest product.īut as much as Calvin Klein changed everything, things also have stayed the same. Sales figures from 2014 show that the international undergarment industry brought in $110 billion, and brands like Calvin Klein were a major part of that success. In the more than two decades since, men’s underwear has become a billion-dollar business. “I think it came through in the print and it came through in the TV.”įollowing the campaign’s groundbreaking popularity, sales grew “exponentially,” both for Calvin Klein and other men’s retailers. “e had a natural likability,” Kraft said.
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Kraft and his boss saw Wahlberg on the cover of Rolling Stone and knew he would be perfect to help Calvin Klein crack the men’s underwear market. “We were repositioning Calvin's men's underwear line, which at the time was a relatively small business,” Neil Kraft, who previously served as the company’s senior VP, told Ad Age. In 1982, the first ever Calvin Klein underwear ad campaign had featured gold medal-winning pole vaulter Tom Hintnaus resplendent in a pair of tighty whities.īut until Marky Mark, the brand had struggled to make designer underwear fashionable for the everyday man. Wahlberg’s wasn't the first moment that men’s underwear had dared sell sex to male consumers: The muscle mags of the 1950s, and underwear catalogs of the ’60s and ’70s featured beefcakes in tight trunks and briefs. We’ve come a long way since the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, but our underwear hasn’t. If that moment felt weirdly unique for a company that sells to a broad audience, it’s because “sexy underwear” for men too often remains a punchline, evoking the homophobia associated with the eroticized male.