Undergear closing

[PSDave]

I have been watching Undergear have a 50% off everything sale. As the weeks went by there were more out of stocks daily. Today there are no pants, no shorts, no shirts, limited underwear (no thongs, no max exposure, etc) and only 3 swimsuits (boxer style). Basically their entire inventory is shoes.
A company once known for swimwear of all styles, resort and athletic wear going into summer with zero inventory only means one thing. Closing the doors.
When I asked they said all new stock next month. Anyone knows that you don't start selling summer clothes in mid June, by then most people have already got their summer wardrobe It's too bad , but it seems we are watching a long time company go under.

[Captain.Jammer]

I had been wondering about them... they have had almost no swimwear the past few times I went on the site. I thought that was odd, but wondered if the new line was not yet out. But, now, we are into the prime swimsuit shopping season, so .. yeah.. it appears you may be correct.

It is sad to see them go. It was their (former?) parent company and catalog, International Male, that first introduced me to the non-traditional styles and non-white underwear many, many years ago as a kid. Their "Buns" brief and Scoop t-shirt were the first ads I had seen that really got me interested in the upcoming "new" styles of underwear for men.

A good amount of my underwear collection came from the pages of the International Male and Undergear catalogs a couple decades ago.

[Dooley67]

I've shopped Undergear for years and am rather on the conservative side in what I order (bikini swimsuits and underwear, an occasional boxer swimsuit, but nothing racy or see through). I have noticed over the last couple of years that many of the styles have become very extreme - see through, what I consider to be bizarre underwear and body-type suits. And I've noticed in their clearance sales that many of these articles I've described are the ones that are on clearance. When shopping for a swim brief, often the ones I want have not been available in my size (S or M) and I know that at least one other person on the board had the same experience. If in fact Undergear is closing, it may be because they went out of the mainstream of underwear and swimwear and those articles simply did not sell. Just my opinion, perhaps I'm wrong.

D67

[Captain.Jammer]

That is very possible, D67.

Just a couple of weeks ago I came a cross a nice looking swim jammer on Undergear.

One thing I thought was really weird was that it had a zipper in the front center. I don't know about you, but I would think that might be uncomfortable touching your parts up front. Plus, the thought of getting pubes or other bits caught in it is rather scary.

Then upon closer inspection (actually reading the description because it was not clear from the image), I found out that the black side panels were mesh. That would be too much for my conservative style.

So, while I liked the colors and the overall styling, those two aspects were a deal breaker for me.

[DesertSpandex]

Would really hate to see them go, it was Undergear that introduced me to mail and internet ordering that greatly broadened the styles of underwear and spandex wear available to me.

[sebbie]

In digging into this I learned that Undergear is owned by Hanover Direct INC, which is an old on-line mail order operation perhaps best known for selling double knit slacks thru ads in magazines via mail order in the 1970s. They own several operations selling an array of different goods, Undergear being one of them. No mention that they are shutting down Undergear is on the Hanover Direct Web sire. This, copied from their Web site:

Hanover Direct, Inc. and its business units provide quality, branded merchandise through a portfolio of catalogs and e-commerce platforms to consumers. Hanover Brands, Inc. is comprised of the Company’s catalog and e-commerce web site portfolio of home fashions, apparel and gift brands, including The Company Store, Company Kids, Undergear, and Scandia Down. Each brand can be accessed on the Internet individually by name. Information on Hanover Direct, including each of its subsidiaries, can be accessed on the Internet at www.hanoverdirect.com.

[PSDave]

International Male started out in San Diego with stores there and West Hollywood. Known for style and outrageous underwear and swim wear. Eventually they created Undergear to focus on under, swim and active wear. All went great. Regular shoppers had personal shoppers that would know your likes and notify you of new merchandise before catalogs came out (pre Internet).
Somewhere along the line they made a Devils pack with Hanover House and moved the operation to Pennsylvania. Service suffered and the personal shoppers were eliminated. Eventually International Male was dissolved and only Undergear remained. Now it seems they have destroyed that.
Once Hanover took over and moved it from California the cutting edge styles were lost as was the personal service. Without the California eye for style the double knit thinking of Hanover House took its toll and it became just another mail order men's catalog. Another case of big business thinking they know better and screwing things up. Maybe I'm being politically incorrect but it seems when you take a gay oriented store with the gay eye for selecting clothing and hand it to a middle America polyester double knit mentality, style suffers.

[SwimTeamSpeedo]

Let me think... polyester double knit or cutting edge gay style. Wow, that's a tough one....lol. They did have nice swimwear in the day, and a good selection of various styles as Cap Jam and D67 point out. I suspect the brand is still strong enough that if some gay entrepreneur wanted to buy it back and resurrect it they could bring it back. However, since the catalog days, access to retailers with similar goods has flourished, making it a much tougher environment to play in.

STS

[sebbie]

International Male at the time gave straights an understanding of what was then a separate gay male culture, part of which was that gay men acted and dressed differently from straight men. For gay men, the clothing was all part of being part of the group.

As gays have gradually been assimilated into a mainstream culture and acceptance that is not defined by a particular sexual orientation, I suspect that there was gradually declining interest in and purchasing of clothing items of all sorts that could readily be seen as somehow "looking gay"

Most gay men like the new world that is evolving, where they are not seen as something different but very much part of everything normal. But that means a gradually declining demand for clothing items that would identify gay men as being gay and part of a separate subculture identified as somehow different. The gay marriage thing and the rapid acceptance of that idea is part of this whole mainstreaming lets not wear clothing that identifies us as different etc, which means declining demand for the International Male Undergear stuff.

MEANWHILE, if I want to shop for a sexy swimsuit, thong or compression gear, I have a host of lower cost vendors than Undergear with interesting stuff to choose from, starting with all the Amazon vendors but going also to all the Asian operations like the vendors in Aliexpress not to mention mainstream "Brief" vendors like Swimoutlet. If I really want clothes to wear that accentuate my male body parts there are dozens and dozens of sources still selling a wide array of goods at reasonable prices.

So, am I interested any more in buying stuff from a vendor that is set up mainly to cater to a "traditional" or old school gay clientele? Not really.

I THINK the California company that ran International Male and Undergear was in serious financial problems at the time IM was closed, and Hanover bought the Undergear brand thinking they could keep it profitable. Its just gotten to the point that running this as a catalog/online operation is no longer a profitable business.

If you want to blame this on something, maybe blame it on how rapidly gays are getting assimilated into mainstream culture in recent years.

As another example, you have Tim Cook, running Apple, and know one knew based on his appearance that he was gay until, just for the fun of it, he decided to announce it. Straight men did not quit buying Apple stuff because of the announcement

But then, you have the now ex-CEO of A&F, obviously gay and with successive plastic surgeries in vain attempts to keep looking like a young gay male, who ran a teen retailer with what could best be described as gay male- themed advertising, despite the occasional bows to heterosexuality with young sexy men and women together in ads. All of this was more than a little weird For some time, the retailer was very popular with teens, and they flocked to wear the branded A&F clothing. But suddenly this all became very uncool, and the kids started staying away in droves. The CEO got dumped and A&F is trying desperately to revamp their bare-chested male image with their customers. The ex-CEO must have had a fetish for flip flops and button fly jeans on males and other weird stuff...The flip flops and bare chests have all but disappeared, and some of their jeans now have (gasp) zipper flies!

Go figure.

[Dooley67]

As a straight man, I used to buy from International Male and Undergear because the swimsuits and the underwear they had were those that I liked. Being heterosexual, I never thought of either of those sites as being gay sites or that they catered to only gay men. I viewed them as sites that carried bikinis and briefs that anyone could/would wear and that by wearing them, you weren't being identified as gay. You were identified as a guy who liked to wear bikinis and briefs.

I wrote in an earlier post that the merchandise became very radical over the last couple of years, perhaps in an attempt to attract more gay men. But I think what happened is that Undergear lost many heterosexuals and metrosexuals because the selection of styles that I would choose, for example, became very limited. And as Sebbie and STS point out, there are so many online stores to choose from that for me, Undergear really won't be missed.

D67