‘All Man’ Review: International Male, a Wishbook on Many Levels
One of the most famous “Seinfeld” episodes involves Jerry wearing a flamboyant “puffy shirt” — which was pretty much a copy of the “ultimate poet’s shirt” sold by International Male.
The piece of apparel might be a pop culture footnote now, but for a while the mail-order catalog that inspired it meant quite a lot, as evidenced by Bryan Darling and Jesse Finley Reed’s documentary.
In the early 1970s, Gene Burkard, a gay former airmanturned entrepreneur, slightly retooled a medical garment called a suspensory into a “jock sock.” Its mail-ordersuccess eventually led to Burkard’s launching International Male, whose catalog peddled unabashedly outlandish men’s clothing modeled by unabashedly sexy hunks.
Narrated by Matt Bomer, the doc breezily chronicles International Male’s rise and fallfrom the 1970s to the mid-00s. As the fashion commentator Simon Doonan argues in the film, International Male documented — and reinvented — gay and straight men’s shared fetishization of masculinity.
