Sunspel and Mr Bingo revive a 1947 boxer short advertisement

Inside a London studio on Amwell Street, surrounded by collected objects and framed illustrations that dance between irreverence and the unexpected, Mr Bingo stood holding a piece of Sunspel history. A 1947 advertisement for the brand’s boxer shorts lay before him, waiting to be reimagined through his distinctive hand. What emerged from this meeting was not mere nostalgia but a conversation between two sensibilities that, despite their apparent distance, speak the same language of craft and restraint.

Mr Bingo’s work has long occupied the territory between the wry and the wonderfully strange. His drawings carry an easiness that masks considerable discipline, a looseness achieved only through years of working with brush and ink. When approached to recreate that vintage Sunspel campaign, he found something kindred in the original. The boxer shorts themselves, after all, represent the opposite of ostentation. They belong to a world where quality whispers rather than shouts, where a piece of clothing need only be exactly right.

Sunspel has made such understatement its purpose since 1947, the very year that advertisement was born. The brand’s approach to essentials, to garments that require no apology and no embellishment, aligns perfectly with the restraint visible in Mr Bingo’s drawings. Both maker and illustrator favour tools that have earned their place through function: the traditional pen, the honest line, the materials that have simply lasted.

The collaboration sits comfortably within Sunspel’s long history of respectful craft. The boxer shorts themselves, rendered in pale blue striped cotton, carry the weight of decades of refinement. Paired with a taupe cotton t shirt in Mr Bingo’s studio, they evoke exactly what the brand has always offered: the confidence of simplicity, the luxury of clothing that requires nothing more than to be worn.

Imagery courtesy of Sunspel (@sunspelclothing).