I was talking to a woman tonight who said she’d seen a man on the Metro wearing a thong. It might have been a G-string, but she pegged it for a thong because of the tell-tale whale tail. This reminded me of the passage in Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture where she described the origins of the thong, dating it back to the thirties. Here’s a linkable piece on the same:

Fashion historians trace the thongs’ first public U.S. appearance to the 1939 World’s Fair when New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia mandated that the city’s nude dancers cover themselves. Fashion designer, Rudi Gernreich has been credited with introducing the first thong bikini in 1974. Another reference states that thongs, originally called tangas, hit the beaches of Brazil in 1977.

Levy goes with the La Guardia theory. This seems to me like a crucial bit of pop cultural history that ought to be more widely known, though I have to disagree with the above about the “tanga,” which all readers of the Victoria’s Secret catalog know is really like a lace version of a boy short.