You could make an argument for Marilyn Monroe's (unseen) insurance panties in The Seven Year Itch. Or Tim Curry's garters in Rocky Horror. Perhaps Tom Cruise's tighty whities in Risky Business. But no. The most iconic undergarments in the history of film are Sting's winged briefs in Dune.
I found part one of the recent Dune remake attractive but boring, and skipped part two, so I can't speak to Austin Butler's performance. Thus Sting will always, to me, be Feyd-Rautha, the narcissistic, psychopathic nephew of the pustulent Baron Harkonnen. He is not so much a character as a burlesque, in line with the rest of the gonzo of David Lynch's Dune. It's not a "good" movie. But it is a memorable one, and cheesy and overstuffed in ways spiritually faithful to Frank Herbert's novels. When Toto plays a power chord as Paul rides the sandworm, when Gurney Halleck carries a pug into battle, when the guild navigator is wheeled in—you get the sneaking suspicion Lynch made an entire movie just to get to a few specific visuals.
So when Sting emerges from the smoke, clad only in a blue, winged codpiece, you go with it. You don't say Why is he wearing that? It's already been established that a) Feyd-Rautha is a true grade-A freak, b) Lynch let his designers throw a bunch of shit at the wall, and c) this is not a movie where things have to have "reasons." Why wouldn't he be wearing that?
"[Lynch] said, ‘You’re wearing these flying underpants,'" Sting recalled decades later. A little bit Art Deco, a little bit H.R. Giger, throw in a hint of fascist art, and you've got sexuality so dangerous it might cut you.
They almost didn't exist. We almost got Sting's dick instead. That would have been memorable too, I suppose. "That was slated to be shot nude, and Sting agreed to do it nude," said Bob Ringwood, Dune's costume designer. "But the studio at the last minute panicked and thought they couldn't have Sting in the nude."
Ringwood, a two-time Oscar nominee whose highly stylized costumes helped define movies like Tim Burton's Batman, Demolition Man, Troy, and A.I., said he got the call literally at midnight the night before the scene was to be shot. So he and his team threw together the sleek jockstrap patterned after Feyd-Rautha's knife-fighting outfit. The rest is history.
Sting got to keep the underpants. He's kept them clean and he still fits into them. How do we know? We know more than we might want to about them. "Trudie makes me wear them sometimes," he said in 2021. Trudie Styler is Sting's longtime wife, with whom he famously boasted he enjoys seven-hour-long tantric sex sessions. The underpants may have powers.
Sting reportedly offered the Harkonnen briefs to Austin Butler, when it was announced that Butler would take on the role in the Denis Villeneuve movies. (Sting did offer to dry-clean them first; it is unclear if he told Butler about the Trudie stuff.) It might have been a nice nod to Dune's rocky filming history, but the new movies are clearly doing their own thing, design-wise. "I think he did them so much justice that I had to do something completely of my own," Butler said.
I think Butler has it right. Lynch's Dune is of a time, a place, and an amount of cocaine that can't and shouldn't be recaptured. It's a fever dream of a future where navigators are fish-men, where infants threaten Reverend Mothers, and where even the underwear has wings.
