For men who lament the decline of the codpiece, or who lack confidence at the office when their pants are not pushing up their genitals all day, Marks & Spencer is riding to the rescue.
The retailer, the UK market leader in selling underwear, has launched what could be considered the male equivalent of the push-up bra.
Its new range of “secret support pants” are “about helping men feel their most confident”, said Mitch Hughes, the director of menswear at M&S. The cotton trunks will offer “a subtle lift and enhanced fit through clever, discreet design”.
How subtle the lift is presumably depends on the wearer. The pants are being launched on Friday evening by the influencers Tom Sheard and Stanley Dru, who said: “Size isn’t everything, but confidence is.”
For some, the product will bring to mind the codpiece, the accessory that anybody who was anybody was wearing in 15th- and 16th-century Europe.
The idea was that it covered and drew attention to a part of the body that people were not meant to mention.
Henry VIII – someone for whom size probably was everything – was depicted with a particularly impressive example in several portraits, including the larger-than-life Holbein the Younger drawing now at the National Portrait Gallery.
Historians have argued that Henry was weaponising his codpiece, creating a feeling of envy in enemies and subjects.
Other magnificent codpieces in art include a chain mail codpiece in Titian’s Portrait of Francesco Maria Della Rovere (1536-38) at the Uffizi in Florence and a more startlingly naturalistic one in a Portrait of Antonio Navagero by Giovanni Battista Moroni (1565), of which the Guardian’s Jonathan Jones once wrote: “Like an erotic accessory photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe, it protrudes massively out from his fur-lined robe.”
M&S said the new range was about focusing on men’s wellbeing. It said the pants combined innovative design and secret support (TM) technology, promising a new internal pouch that would discreetly lift and support “all day long”.
