boo!, briefly.

we surveyed exactly three customers before starting this brand.

the idea came from two thoughts that happened to collide. the first was about Matisse's cut-paper paintings from the 1940s, the Blue Nudes and the Jazz series, the thing where he gave up on oil painting near the end of his life and started cutting shapes out of colored gouache paper with scissors and pinning them to the wall. the second was about how most men's underwear looks like athletic equipment, and how the rare exception usually ends up looking like it was designed by someone who doesn't wear men's underwear.

somewhere between those two thoughts was the idea for boo!

the first drop is three pools, each from a specific year. villa noailles in 1923. the peninsula in 1928. piscine molitor in 1929. all three were built during the same narrow window between the wars, when the very rich were commissioning private pools the way they commissioned paintings, one at a time, from specific architects, in specific places, each one a little different from the last. before WWII standardized everything, before pools became backyard fixtures and hotel amenities, they were unique objects that belonged to the buildings and the gardens they were part of. you couldn't separate the pool from the place. that's the part boo! is interested in.

the underwear itself took longer to get right than the paintings did. we bought and wore every pair of men's underwear we could find, the athletic ones and the editorial ones and the supposed-to-be-luxury ones and the ones that came in black boxes. we kept notes. we settled on 95% modal because it's the softest thing we could find that takes dye well, and a high-rise slim cut because it's the one thing most men's underwear gets wrong. we made it in portugal because the factories there have been making knitwear for a hundred years and it shows. none of this is revolutionary. it's just the version we would have wanted.

that's most of what there is to say.

the last thing worth saying is that boo! is not a real underwear company yet. it's three paintings on three pairs of underwear, made in small batches, sold until they're gone. whether drop two exists, and what's in it, depends on whether anyone cares.

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