If twenty years back, a guy were walking down Miami Beach in bikini underwear, the White House would issue a nationwide emergency. But now that times and people’s outlook have changed, and in a way, for the better, such a sight would not garner any negative reaction. Designs and styles in the underwear industry have gone revolutionary changes, and bikini underwear for men is a birth child of that revolution.
Men’s bikini is a general term for describing types of swimsuits for men, their underwear or briefs, or related clothing. The side panels can be low and high; however most do not contain flap fronts or a button. They can also have string sides or tie sides, but unlike briefs, they lack an identifiable waistband. Men’s bikini can be used for many activities some of which include sun-bathing, personal entertainment, or simply for fashion. One example – the posing brief bikini – is used as a standard for body building competitions.
Internationally renowned fashion designers like Dolce & Gabbana, Paul Smith, and Giogio Armani, etc., have also come up with their own designs for bikini underwear for men although they have changed traditional colors of the famous bikini from bright to darker shades like black. They have also tried to market this idea of men wearing bikinis by citing examples of Roman and Greeks statues that depicted men in minimal or no clothing. Nikos Apostolopoulos, a Greek designer, used his creativity in producing bathing suits that modelled the sexual characteristics of the sexes.
Historically, it wasn’t common for a man to wear a bikini, let alone in public, and society wasn’t too keen on accepting the idea as well. However, with the women’s liberation movement gaining momentum in the late seventies, people began to open up to the idea of men, too, wearing revealing clothes and swimsuits in public locations. It’s not at all unusual to find men sporting thongs, bikinis, and g-strings in public all over the world, although it did take some time for this trend to catch up in North America than it did across the Atlantic, as men in Europe have had no shame in sporting their bikinis since the sixties. This might have something to do with the fact that Europe is a more sexually liberated place than America. It is because of this reason that the idea of bikini underwear for men hasn’t really opened up in Asia or the middle-east – although the popular movie Borat did show Sacha Baron Cohen’s Kazakh protagonist wearing a form of the bikini called, “the mankini” while sunbathing.
As a consumer though, anyone sitting in front of his computer anywhere in the world has the option of ordering bikini underwear for men. He has the option of selecting through a wide range of colours, brands and styles. This selection though, is very important because a man does not want to be stuck (no pun intended) in the wrong bikini as that would be utterly discomforting.
