The Great Outdoor Underwear Festival Might Be Piqua, Ohio’s Wildest Legacy

In Dav Pilkey’s beloved “Captain Underpants” series, the small city of Piqua is frequently rescued by the titular underwear-clad superhero.

Unfortunately, the real-life Piqua, in western Ohio, doesn’t have a real underwear-clad superhero. But if you were to visit the city on a crisp autumn weekend in the 1990s, you’d find hundreds of people parading around Main Street in their underwear. 

If you were lucky, you’d also bear witness to the one and only “Undy 500,” where people raced go-karts in their boxer briefs, or the “5K Drop Seat Trot” marathon where people ran in bright red union suits. 

Enter Piqua’s very own Great Outdoor Underwear Festival, held every October from 1988 to 1998, where attendees could be free from the shackles of trousers and have a good time.

The festival was a celebration of Piqua’s former status as the “Underwear Capital of the World,” a moniker the city earned by the abundance of underwear manufacturers located in the city, including BVD, Superior Underwear and the now-defunct Atlas Underwear Company. 

The industry was crucial for Piqua’s economy in the 20th century. The city became home to the country’s first drop seat union suits, manufactured by the Piqua Hosiery Company, and the country’s first thermal underwear line, produced by Atlas Underwear. The underwear economy boom was especially prominent during World War II, when Atlas began producing underwear specifically for the U.S. military.

In 1988, a group of Piqua business owners decided to commemorate this history by holding the Great Outdoor Underwear Festival. This first iteration featured only a single underwear parade, which was so small that the festival’s coordinators made the marchers change clothes and perform the parade a second time so that it seemed twice as large, according to Ron Johnson, former coordinator of the Great Outdoor Underwear Festival.

But the festival gradually grew larger and larger, with more unique underwear-related events being added each year.

Each new event was quirkier than the last; from boxer balls, where people danced the night away wearing formal dress clothes coupled with eccentric boxer briefs, to bed races, where festival goers put beds on wheels and pushed their mattresses to victory.

With more events came more attendees, and the festival quickly attracted between 10,000 and 12,000 people annually. Soon enough, the festival became the center of national attention, with radio stations and newspapers across the country calling Johnson and his colleagues to report on it. One California radio station even offered listeners a free trip to Piqua to attend.

“Wall Street Journal had a half-page article on it,” Johnson said. “The executive director of the [Piqua] Chamber of Commerce said, ‘You know, I pay thousands of dollars to get a little column in it, and you got … a half a page for free.’” 

The Great Outdoor Underwear Festival had never been greater. But the festival’s coordinators had an idea that would take it to celebrity status.

“They started to have a celebrity auction, and people from across the country would send in underwear with their autograph on them, and then they’d auction them off,” Piqua Public Library historian Andy Hite said. 

Dozens of celebrities sent signed underwear for the auction, including Bill Clinton, Dick Van Dyke, Dolly Parton, Whoopi Goldberg and the entire Cincinnati Bengals team. 

But all good things must come to an end, and October 1998 saw the final Great Outdoor Underwear Festival. According to former Piqua Main Street Director Lorna Swisher, the festival’s original team of organizers were ready to move on, and they couldn’t find a new team willing to take their place.

Now, the Great Outdoor Underwear Festival is a memory — one that is fading from the minds of Piqua’s residents.

“There’s enough new people in Piqua that don’t really realize that [industrial] tie to Piqua,” Hite said. “Early on in the festival, a lot of people said, ‘Well, my mom worked there,’ or ‘I worked there … for a long time in one of the [underwear] factories,’ and we don’t have that connection so much anymore.”

Despite the Underwear Festival’s closure, the memory of the festival still lives on in the form of a best-selling children’s book.

The “Captain Underpants” series, which takes place in Piqua and was inspired by the Great Outdoor Underwear Festival, has also served to ignite interest in the city. 

“When I was with Main Street office, we would occasionally have kids and families come in and say that they were coming to Piqua to see the community that the [Captain Underpants] folks were based on,” Swisher said.

Although Captain Underpants is always depicted wearing nothing but tighty-whities and a cape, the attendees at the Great Outdoor Underwear Festival weren’t quite so scantily clad. 

“There was nobody running around in their undershorts or their panties or anything like that. Although I think, had we continued it, it may have gotten to that point, as things changed over the years,” Johnson said. “There were … a lot of people in just their regular street clothes.”