The annual 'No Trousers Tube Ride' returned on Sunday afternoon as hundreds of people stripped down to their underwear and travelled on the London Underground network. Despite the freezing temperatures, a large number of bare-legged men and women headed onto the Tube at Newport Place in Chinatown.
Similar crowds gathered at Waterloo, Westminster, and South Kensington stations, BBC reported.
In several photographs and videos, commuters strutted down escalators, taking selfies on platforms or simply posing inside carriages highlighting their underwear styles and colours.
In a post on Facebook, the organisers of the event told participants to dress in “pants as normal or low-key as possible, so it looks like you've just forgotten your trousers,” according to The Independent.
There's no motive behind this event other than injecting a little levity into the bleak midwinter season. "There's so much bad, so much not fun going on. It's nice to do something just for the sake of it," ringleader Dave Selkirk, a 40-year-old personal trainer, told The Associated Press.
The first such event -- the brainchild of local comedian Charlie Todd -- was held in New York in 2002. Todd simply thought it might be funny if one walked onto a subway train in the middle of the winter season while wearing everything from a hat and gloves to a scarf but not pants.
"The whole point is just to create unexpected moments of joy, delight and confusion. I'm very happy to see the tradition live on. It's meant to be a bit of harmless fun. Certainly, we are living in a climate where people like to have culture war fights and my rule in New York was always that my goal is to amuse other people, to give people a laugh," Todd told BBC.
In 2002, the New York event saw seven people, all without their trousers, boarding a train one after the other at seven consecutive stops and later pretending as if they did not notice each other.
By 2008, this idea went international, with 900 people participating in New York, while nine other cities joined in. Big cities such as Chicago, Portland, San Francisco, Baltimore, Boston, Salt Lake City, Toronto, Washington DC and Adelaide have witnessed their own versions of the event.
