Commercial attention for underwear and the businesses that sell it, a trade that put the brief on a Chicago mannequin in 1935 and sold six hundred packages by noon.
“Freshpair created the day to promote its own store and dates it to 2003.
Freshpair, an online underwear retailer then based in Fairfield, New Jersey, created the day as a promotion for its own store, and has stated publicly that it was created on August 5, 2003. Its federal trademark applications give a different date for first use of the name, June 1, 2003.
National Underwear Day is not a national day in any official sense. It is a phrase an online store spent nearly five years trying to own, and the federal government's first answer was no.
Freshpair applied to register the name in April 2004. An examiner refused it, then issued a final refusal in June 2005. The registration the company did receive, in May 2006, landed on the Supplemental Register, the secondary list the trademark office keeps for marks that are not distinctive.
It came with one more condition. Freshpair had to disclaim the word underwear, the step federal law reserves for an unregistrable component of a mark. The name survived intact, but the claim to its central word did not.
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Underwear was one garment before it was two. Cooper Underwear Company built its business on White Cat union suits, and patented a version it sold as the Kenosha Klosed Krotch. By 1912 it was selling faster than the company could produce it, by the company's own account.
The one-piece did not give way all at once. In 1929 Cooper's cut it down to a short-legged, sleeveless version called the Singleton and sold it in cellophane bags, which the company calls a first in the underwear trade.
The brief itself arrived in a store window. Coopers put its legless design on a mannequin at Marshall Field & Company in Chicago on January 19, 1935, a day Smithsonian Magazine describes as blustery and cold. Six hundred packages were gone by noon.
Three years later the company staged one of the first underwear fashion shows, at a retail convention in Chicago, and called it "The Cellophane Wedding."
Freshpair was an online underwear retailer, founded in 2000. In 2003 it gave itself a holiday, and it has never been consistent about when. Its own announcement says the day "was created on August 5, 2003," while both trademark applications give a first-use date of June 1, 2003.
The second application, filed in July 2008, took a different route. It claimed the phrase had acquired distinctiveness, the statutory path that lets the office accept five years of substantially exclusive and continuous use as evidence that a mark has become distinctive. The claimed first-use date fell just over five years before that filing, and the Principal Register accepted the mark in February 2009.
The eleventh observance was not going to be another fashion show. Freshpair and the radio station Z100 called New Yorkers to Broadway on August 5, 2013 to attempt a world record.
"We'd been in Times Square three times before, but those had been fashion shows with models," company president Matthew Butlein told DNAinfo. "This year, we wanted it to be about everyone."
The judges counted 779 people in their underwear. The record they had come to beat was 2,270.
TIMELINE
WHY THIS DAY MATTERS
The day's best-known numbers cite nothing at all.
The best-known underwear percentages attached to this day, including the claim that 80% of Americans never change the style of underwear they wear, come from a 2010 Freshpair press release that names no study, survey or source for any of them. The release even hedged its own numbers, introducing them as figures that 'may (or may not) surprise you.'
The original 2006 registration was cancelled in December 2016 after Freshpair failed to file an acceptable declaration under Section 8. The registration that survived was renewed in 2019 and now belongs to Fresh Pair LLC of Weston, Florida.
In the registration itself, the day is not described as an awareness campaign or a celebration but as a service: promoting the sale of underwear by promoting public awareness of the need for recognition of the importance of underwear. The 2008 filing added the arranging of promotional events and commercial fashion show exhibitions.
GOOD TO KNOW
nationalunderwearday.com is still live and still advertises the August 5, 2013 event in the present tense, down to the meeting point on Broadway between 46th and 47th Streets.
That same site published the record's eligibility rules in full, and the wet-weather clause was explicit: if it rained, participants could carry umbrellas but could not wear ponchos.
Guinness World Records notes that the Utah Undie Run, the gathering Freshpair failed to outdraw, was organised to challenge the perception that Utah is an 'uptight' state.
Cooper hired Joseph C. Leyendecker, an illustrator for The Saturday Evening Post, to draw its 'Man on the Bag' image, which the company calls a classic of American advertising.
When eight participants in Improv Everywhere's fifth No Pants Subway Ride were handcuffed in their underwear, a judge dismissed all the charges a month later.
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No. It is an unofficial observance with no governmental recognition, so it is a normal working day. A search of the Federal Register for the phrase returns no documents at all, and the only federal record of the name is a private company's trademark registration.
COLOPHON
Mary Phelps Jacob sold her brassiere patent for $1,500; the buyer made $15 million from it, and the day marks the industry those transactions built.
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