Undressing Masculinity: How Men Fashion Themselves Through Underwear
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Underwear is a ubiquitous form of garment which is used by nearly all men on any given day. However, studies of men’s fashion and daily dress practices do not examine how these items shape men’s lives. Past research on underwear focuses on brands, advertising, and (rarely) individual identity. How groups of men engage with underwear daily as part of their identities or what implications these practices might have for wider understandings of masculinity have not been explored. How the material garment of underwear interacts with the fleshy male body is also left unexamined. This research uses wardrobe interviews with nine men, alongside object analyses of their favorite pairs of underwear, to investigate how their relationship to underwear has developed and evolved over the course of their lives, how their underwear choices change— or not change—in different contexts, and how men navigate and manage their body through their underwear. Participants included several white and Asian identifying men along with one mixed race man and a Latino man. Most identified as heterosexuals. In the course of this study three themes emerged: how underwear relates to the intimate body; what influences their decisions around underwear consumption; and how men’s underwear is disavowed as part of fashion. My research uncovered that men develop emotional bonds with their underwear—and rely upon these garments as part of their gender performance—but their engagement with these items is restricted by social boundaries which serve to reify attributes of hegemonic masculinity. Keywords: underwear, men’s fashion, masculinity, fashion, manhood acts, hegemonic masculinity
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".