A sock maker, a move west and a trademarked town.

Jockey began as a sock business. The International Directory of Company Histories, in its entry on Jockey International, says that in 1876 Samuel T. Cooper bought hand-operated knitting machines and, with his sons Charles, Henry and Willis, founded S.T. Cooper & Sons, a hosiery maker in Ludington, Michigan, that sold heavy wool socks to general stores. English Wikipedia, citing published histories and Women’s Wear Daily, places the 1876 founding in St. Joseph, Michigan, and says Cooper started the business after hearing that lumberjacks were poorly served by their wool socks. Women’s Wear Daily referred to the founder as the Rev. Samuel T. Cooper in October 2024.

The move that gave the company its long-term home came at the turn of the century. The directory says that around 1900 Cooper’s moved its operations to Kenosha, Wisconsin, which became its headquarters, and changed its name to Cooper’s Underwear Company. By then the firm had added men’s union suits, the long-sleeved, long-legged knit garment that buttoned up the front, to its socks. In 1910 it introduced a union suit that did away with front buttons, sold as the “Kenosha Klosed Krotch”; the company patented the design and trademarked the Kenosha name, according to the directory.

Advertising arrived early, and it arrived through illustration. According to the directory, Cooper’s placed an advertisement in the Saturday Evening Post on 6 May 1911, having hired the illustrator Leyendecker to produce a series of colour renderings of its products, and three years later a Leyendecker rendering of a “man on the bag” became a staple of the Cooper’s brand identity. The company briefly called itself Cooper’s, Inc. in 1926 and set up an export department two years later.

The word that would eventually replace the family name came at the end of that decade. The directory dates the Jockey name to 1929, when Cooper’s gave it to the “Jockey Singleton,” a sleeveless one-piece garment made of Durene yarn that came to the knee. The company chose the name to suggest athleticism and flexibility, and trademarked both the name and the construction of the garment, the directory says.

A postcard, a Chicago window and a family company.

The garment that carried the name into everyday speech followed in the mid-1930s. Smithsonian magazine reported in January 2015 that in 1934 Arthur Kneibler, an executive at Coopers, received a postcard from a friend on the French Riviera showing a man in a short, tight bathing suit, and used it as the starting point for a legless undergarment with a Y-front. The Victoria and Albert Museum, in an essay on men’s underwear by Shaun Cole, describes Kneibler as Cooper’s vice president and says the style drew on French briefs, or “slips,” and swimwear. Coopers called the product “Jockey” shorts, likening the support to that of a jockstrap, Smithsonian wrote.

The launch is remembered for its setting. On 19 January 1935 the briefs went on sale at Marshall Field’s in Chicago, displayed on a mannequin in a front window on a cold, blustery day, Smithsonian reported. The company-history directory adds that a blizzard was under way and that managers asked for the display to be taken down, but the workers due to remove it were delayed. The directory says Cooper’s Underwear Company received a patent on the Y-front construction in August 1935, and the V&A notes that the knitted garment had elastic leg openings and a waistband with the name woven into it.

The directory describes Jockey as privately owned since its inception. It says that in 1971 the company was bought by Harry Wolf, who had worked as a consultant to it, and was renamed for its trademark; it was reincorporated as Jockey International, Inc. on 1 May 1972. The V&A gives 1971 as the year Cooper’s became Jockey Menswear Inc. Ownership later passed to Wolf’s children, and in 1993 his daughter Donna Wolf Steigerwaldt became sole owner, the directory says; in 2001 leadership passed to her daughter, Debra Waller. Women’s Wear Daily described Jockey in October 2024 as a third-generation, family-owned company headquartered in Kenosha, and named Mark Fedyk as its president and chief operating officer.

Manufacturing moved away from Wisconsin over the same decades. The directory records that in 1993 and 1994 the company closed four U.S. plants, including its last factory in Wisconsin, leaving the corporate headquarters in Kenosha, as production shifted to the southern United States and to Central America and the Caribbean. In late 1996 Jockey agreed to buy from Courtaulds Textiles the long-running UK licensee operation that made Jockey underwear at a plant in northern England and distributed it in the United Kingdom and Scandinavia. Licensing ran in the other direction too: the directory lists a Tommy Hilfiger underwear line from 1994 and Liz Claiborne Intimates, launched in early 2000.

Design and documentation.

Underwear and basics brands in general live on a small set of surfaces. Before a garment is worn, its brand is carried by a box, a sleeve, a multipack bag or a card header on a peg; once it is unwrapped, the name moves to a woven waistband, a printed neck label or a small sewn-in tag; and in a store, a hang-tag or a fixture sign does the work that a shop assistant once did behind the counter.

Each of those surfaces has its own constraints. A waistband has to read in a narrow horizontal band, often repeated around the body, so a name set there tends to be short, wide and simple. A pack has to hold a name, a size and a style at arm’s length on a crowded shelf. A hang-tag sits close to the eye and can carry more words, a fuller logo and a line of copy.

The guides in this group look at those surfaces brand by brand: who started each name, who owns it now, how its labels, packs and advertising have changed, and where independent records and the company’s own account each stand.

A name on the waistband, a boy on the counter.

Jockey’s identity has always run through two names. Between 1929 and 1971 the company traded as Cooper’s while its underwear carried the Jockey name; the directory notes that the 1971 renaming took the company’s name from the trademark it had promoted over the decades. Women’s Wear Daily reported in October 2024 that Jockey and the country singer Luke Bryan, an ambassador for the brand since 2020, would open a Nashville store called Coopers 12South, designed by the Nashville interior designer Mark Simmons, and that Jockey had opened a satellite office in Nashville that June.

Figures and displays have carried the brand in print and in stores. The directory says that in the early 1940s Cooper’s introduced a new trademark, the Jockey Boy statue, to set its products apart from competitors’, and made a slide-and-sound film on selling underwear in 1941 to reinforce it. In February 1938 the company staged the “Cellophane Wedding” at a retail clothiers’ convention in Chicago: two models in evening clothes, half of each outfit made of cellophane to show the underwear beneath. The directory names Babe Ruth and Yogi Berra among the sports figures who endorsed its products in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and says that in 1980 the company named the Baltimore Orioles pitcher Jim Palmer as its sole spokesperson.

Packaging and advertising followed the same pattern of named campaigns. The directory records a special Christmas box for underwear in 1954, television spots on NBC’s Home Show in 1955, an in-house advertising agency from 1985 whose campaigns featured “real people” such as a construction worker and a mother, and the “Let ’em know you’re Jockey” campaign, created with Grey Advertising and launched in March 1998. The V&A says that Cooper’s licensed its designs in the United Kingdom and Australia and ran advertisements that combined illustrations and photographs with witty straplines; the museum holds a pair of Jockey Y-fronts made in England in 1986–87.

For a design guide, Jockey shows a product name outgrowing the company that coined it: a word given to a one-piece garment in 1929 became the corporate name in 1972, carried along the way by a woven waistband, a statue and a long run of illustrated and photographic advertising. Compare Hanes and Champion. For this guide we use waistband navy, brief white and Kenosha red with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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