Do you feel lucky?

So, Chinese New Year is coming up, and apparently, according to this article, "Red men's underwear emblazoned with auspicious animals and characters have become the rage among Malaysian Chinese."

I know a little bit about Chinese culture, and luck is considered very important therein. The article also points out that the color red itself is very important to the Chinese, so I guess that may be why a clerk at one department store is quoted as saying that the spiffy red ones account for about 30% of their men's underpants sales.

Still, I can't help but wonder why they wouldn't just buy something like a red t-shirt emblazoned with lucky slogans like "golden fortune" or "swirling dragons," especially since a New Straits Times article on the lucky shorts is mentioned thusly:

[The] article was accompanied by a picture of three young women laughing while looking at a cut-at-the waist mannequin wearing the reversible bright red briefs with Chinese characters in gold. The underwear can be worn inside out to reveal red characters on gold fabric.

Uh-huh. Perhaps, like a certain other kind of brightly-colored underwear, they're not so lucky after all.