Stanfield’s, the Truro underwear maker, is a Nova Scotia institution, with roots stretching back to 1855. Bank of Nova Scotia was founded 23 years earlier, but Stanfield’s has been around longer than the Sobey grocery empire, Shaw “no relation” Brick and Royal Bank—started 1864 in Halifax as Merchants Bank. The “Shrink-Proof Process” made Stanfield’s wool undies an indispensable part of miners’ gear during the Klondike gold rush of 1898, turning Stanfield’s into an export success story nearly 100 years before Clearwater shipped its first lobster. The company has even made innovations without realizing it. Decades before Calvin Klein came along, Stanfield’s was using homoerotic imagery to sell gitch.

A couple strapping lads who’ve taken off their pants and are starting to wrestle? Their union suits buttoned all the way to the top, as if the blatant repression can deny the scene’s homoerotic subtext? That rug? It’s all so G-A-Y, gay. And the artwork is unretouched from a Stanfield’s package circa 1920. Those wrestlers have been a Stanfield’s symbol since the early 1900s, which makes them likely both the world’s oldest gay underwear models and the province’s most famous queer icons.

A website called Vintage Skivvies (vintageskivvies.com, oddly enough) has a photo gallery of underwear boxes from the ’20s. Judging by the collection, the marketing thrust of the day was more about technological boasting than sexual suggestion: Sealpax offers a patented “Step Thru” twin-button union suit; Springtex suits have “Improved Spring Needle Rib.” The box from “Body Friendly Union Suits” pictures a pair of athletes, one checking out the other’s discus, and on a Healthknit package two men in underwear are hanging out in a locker room—nothing funny’s happening, except the pipe-smoking guy has a golf club. Only the Stanfield’s box, with the same wrestlers as our Pride Issue cover, dares to have men touching.

Few details of the brave logo’s history are known. “It’s folklore to me,” says Stanfield’s president Tom Stanfield by phone from his Truro office. “What I understand is there were other people in the US market who had a wrestler-type symbol that inspired ours. The idea of the wrestlers was that the garments are tough and durable-and masculine. Hand-wrestling is sort of a strength thing.” Stanfield, great-grandson of the company’s founder, spends his days on tasks that usually do not include parsing the old image for homoerotic messaging, but he can understand how someone might get ideas from the logo. “I suppose in today’s world it means even more.”

While looking at the wrestlers through a postmodern lens gives them new life, modern realities of the knickers market have sent the guys into decline. “Underwear has come a long way for both sexes since the ’30s and ’40s,” says Stanfield. People used to wear union suits all year, switching from thicker fabrics to thinner when summer arrived. Then the rubber waistband came along, freeing the brief from its obligatory union with the shirt. (Don’t worry about how the t-shirt made out after the divorce; World War II helped it become a fashion star in its own right.) Stanfield’s kept up with developments. The wrestlers couldn’t.

“The wrestlers were associated more with our heavier products. Winter underwear is still an important part of our business, but lighter underwear is even more important,” says Stanfield. “Today it’s harder to have competing branding visuals. The wrestlers used to be more prominent on our packaging and cartons, but now we play up the name Stanfield’s.”

I’m wearing a pair of Stanfield’s right now. They came packaged in a cardboard tube printed with amazingly unsexy photos of men engaged in outdoor sports. The writing on the tube explains how the “Micro-Mesh ALL CLIMATE performance underwear” with “flatlock stitching” is “Air Conditioned” to keep “everyone from the general activist to the serious X-treme cross trainer” cool, dry and comfortable. The wrestlers are nowhere to be seen. But I’m sure I can feel them, and Stanfield’s official corporate story backs me up: “Stanfield’s has a long history of pride in its products, which we will build on as we move into the future.”<<