Get Your Panties in a Bunch for Ypsilanti

by Julie Cook

August 14th, 2007 in Careers, Companies, Creative, Fashion

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What do you get when you mix history and hometown pride with some creativity? Well, the Ypsipanty, of course. Check out this cool story by Jordan Miller in The Ann Arbor News about Linette Lao and Mark Maynard, two Ypsilanti artists and creators-of-all-things-clever, who created the Ypsipanty.

“We were just thinking about Ypsi-positive things that we could make,” Maynard says. “The whole idea of the Ypsipanty was, at least to us, fun and playful without being disrespectful. And it drew on Ypsi’s history as an underwear capital.”

Here’s the skivvy: “If love grows cold, do not despair. There is always Ypsilanti underwear.”

That was the slogan of the Ypsilanti Underwear Co., the factory on the banks of the Huron River that made the word “Ypsilanti” synonymous with underwear in turn-of-the-century America.

They have been selling “Ypsipanties,” boy-shorts style, hot pink underwear screen-printed with the word “Ypsipanty,” in the city and through their Web site (crimewaveusa.com) since August 2003. The underwear is part of their line of Ypsilanti-themed items, including the popular “Iggy Pop was born in Ypsilanti” T-shirt. They have sold close to 200 pairs of Ypsipanties.

The Ypsilanti Underwear Co. was not without its own tongue-in-cheek marketing strategies. In addition to its suggestive slogan, the company also placed a 15-foot painting of a curvaceous woman dressed in a tightly fitting Ypsilanti-made union suit in a location highly visible to passengers on the Michigan Central Railroad.

The “Ypsilanti Lady,” which caused a fair deal of controversy among local residents, became a Midwestern landmark and was even mentioned in the Saturday Evening Post in the late 1800s.

Get your pair at www.crimewaveusa.com.