This pair of underpants captures the entirety of Montgomery Clift’s tragic, gorgeous life
By 14, he was delighting Broadway audiences onstage. At 25 years old, he’d made his Hollywood debut. By 45, after a tragic, nearly career-ending accident, he was dead. Queer Hollywood icon Montgomery Clift’s story is well known by this point, but his complex legacy continued to inspire queer artists long after his death in 1966. Onesuch artist was New York School luminary Joe Brainard, who paid tribute to Clift in a 1975 art piece, “Monty Clift’s Shorts.” Inspired by a moment when Brainard was too broke to buy traditional art-making materials, the evocative MoMA-based piece manages to call to mind Clift’s sensitivity, sweetness, and complex relationship to celebrity. 19 years after creating the piece, Brainard himself succumbed to AIDS-related pneumonia, leaving behind a suite of visual works, set designs, and an influential, unconventional autobiography, I Remember. “I remember the…