‘All Man’ Review: International Male, a Wishbook on Many Levels

One of probably the most well-known “Seinfeld” episodes entails Jerry sporting a flamboyant “puffy shirt” — which was just about a duplicate of the “ultimate poet’s shirt” bought by International Male. The piece of attire could be a popular culture footnote now, however for some time the mail-order catalog that impressed it meant rather a lot, as evidenced by Bryan Darling and Jesse Finley Reed’s documentary.

In the early Nineteen Seventies, Gene Burkard, a homosexual former airman turned entrepreneur, barely retooled a medical garment known as a suspensory right into a “jock sock.” Its mail-order success ultimately led to Burkard’s launching International Male, whose catalog peddled unabashedly outlandish males’s clothes modeled by unabashedly attractive hunks.

Narrated by Matt Bomer, the doc breezily chronicles International Male’s rise and fall from the Nineteen Seventies to the mid-00s. As the style commentator Simon Doonan argues within the movie, International Male documented — and reinvented — homosexual and straight males’s shared fetishization of masculinity. Casting apart the cloaking gadgets generally known as darkish fits and white shirts, the catalog displayed butch specimens lounging in scorching pants, crop tops and thongs, with colour schemes working a retina-searing gamut from coral and lime to prints like purple zebra stripes. Anticipating Instagram, the corporate turned clothes into lifestyle, whereas additionally offering a coded fantasy outlet for homosexual males across the nation.

Admittedly, the movie is extra dutiful than clever, ticking one field after one other, an inclination that’s particularly apparent when it ventures to the darkish facet of paradise (the ravages of AIDS on staff and prospects, the dearth of variety among the many catalog fashions). Then it’s proper again to knights in white satin and the belief that males’s gauze harem pants have been as soon as an instrument of liberation.

All Man: The International Male Story
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 23 minutes. Available to hire or purchase on most main platforms.