Before the Brief: Loincloths, Fundoshi and Four Thousand Years

Linen in Tutankhamun's tomb, leather trunks in a London well, a length of Japanese cotton: the history of underwear before briefs, over four thousand years.

By Keith · 29 July 2026 · 11 min read

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When Howard Carter's team worked through Tutankhamun's burial, among the gold and the chariots and the furniture they catalogued linen. A great deal of linen. The Metropolitan Museum, which holds Harry Burton's photographs from the excavation, records that the tomb contained more than a hundred and forty loincloths: plain, three-cornered pieces of cloth with ties, folded and packed for a king to wear in the next world.

Not ceremonial vestments. Underwear. A pharaoh was sent into eternity with a supply of clean pants.

That detail undoes an assumption most of us carry around without examining it, which is that underwear is a modern refinement. It is not. It is one of the oldest things human beings made, it took a small number of recognisable forms across wildly separated cultures, and the shape it kept returning to is remarkably close to the shape currently sitting at the back of your drawer.

The oldest one we have

The earliest surviving example belonged to a man who died in the Alps around 3300 BC and was found in the ice on the Italian and Austrian border in 1991.

Ötzi's kit is the most complete prehistoric wardrobe anyone has recovered, and the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology, which holds it, lists a loincloth among the items: a single piece made from narrow strips of sheep hide stitched together, roughly a hundred centimetres by thirty-three, worn between the legs and held up by his belt. Separate leggings covered the thighs. There was no woven cloth in the outfit at all.

A long strip of material passed between the legs and secured at the waist. Hold that description, because you are going to see it again on three continents across five thousand years.

Egypt, and the case for linen

Egypt is where the garment first becomes visible in quantity, because Egypt buried things in dry sand and dry sand is kind to flax.

The Egyptian loincloth, often called the schenti, was worn by everyone from labourers to kings, sometimes as the only garment and sometimes under a robe. The construction was simple and clever: a piece of linen cut with three points and finished with ties, wrapped and knotted so it stayed put through work. Tutankhamun's supply is the famous find, but the garment appears across social classes in wall paintings and in textiles from ordinary burials.

The choice of material is the part worth respecting. Linen in a hot dry climate is close to correct. It moves moisture away fast, dries faster still, can be boiled and bleached repeatedly, and softens with use. Four thousand years on we are solving the same problem with the same physics, and the modern answer is usually a fine cotton or a wood-pulp fibre doing the identical job The Fabric Bible: What Your Briefs Are Actually Made Of.

The Egyptians also, as far as anyone can tell, associated fresh white linen with cleanliness and status, an early appearance of an idea that has never quite gone away Why Underwear Is White.

Rome, and the trunks in a London well

The Roman subligaculum is usually translated as loincloth, and it seems to have covered a range of garments: a wrapped cloth for some, stitched shorts for others. Athletes wore one. Gladiators wore one. It went under the tunic for those who bothered, and plenty did not.

The most interesting surviving object is not from Italy at all. It came out of a backfilled Roman well at Queen Victoria Street in the City of London, and the London Museum dates it to roughly 43 to 100 AD. It is a pair of leather trunks, cut to shape and tied with leather laces at each hip, and it is small.

The museum is admirably careful about what it was for. The size and comparison with Roman art suggest an acrobat or performer, and a French statuette of a female acrobat in similar briefs with knee pads supports that reading, though the curators note that everyday underwear and sanitary use remain live possibilities. Further examples have since turned up in Roman London's rubbish.

Whoever wore it, that object shows the fitted, laced, hip-tied brief existing as a solved design problem in the first century. Not a wrapped cloth. A garment cut to a body, with adjustable fastenings, for someone who needed to move hard.

The medieval gap, and the room nobody opened

Then the record goes quiet, and the reason is unglamorous: cloth rots. Northern European soil destroys linen. Almost everything historians know about medieval underwear comes from manuscript illumination, wills, laundry accounts and the occasional legal complaint rather than from surviving garments.

The garment in question was the braies. Descended from the trousers Roman writers attributed to Celtic and Germanic peoples, braies had become by the high Middle Ages an undergarment: loose linen drawers, at points ankle length and later much shorter, gathered at the waist over a cord. The hose covering the leg were separate and were tied up to them.

Then in 2008, during building work at Castle Lengberg in East Tyrol, a sealed void under a floor gave up several hundred textile fragments used as construction fill and left undisturbed since. Beatrix Nutz of the University of Innsbruck led the analysis. The find is best known for four linen bras, which rewrote a chapter of women's dress history, but it also produced one complete pair of linen underpants, a fragment of a second, and a wool codpiece cut from a pair of hose. Fibre samples went to ETH Zürich, and radiocarbon put the material in the fifteenth century.

One complete pair. That is the state of the European evidence for several hundred years of an entire continent's underwear, which should make anybody cautious about confident claims in this area.

The codpiece was a fastening before it was a boast

The codpiece has a reputation as pure Renaissance swagger, and the swagger is real, but it began as a joinery problem.

As doublets got shorter through the fifteenth century and hose were still two separate legs, a gap opened at the fork with nothing covering it. The first codpieces were a shaped panel of cloth filling that gap and tied shut with points. Cambridge's Victoria Bartels, who has done the most careful recent work on the object, notes that Edward IV's parliament of 1463 legislated on covering the privy members, which tells you the gap was a live public issue rather than a fashion opportunity.

The stuffing, jewelling and general escalation came afterwards, peaking around the middle of the sixteenth century among German and Swiss mercenaries and those who wanted to look like them. And then it went, essentially by 1600. Bartels' explanation is the most persuasive available: the padded peascod belly of the late sixteenth century expanded downward into the same physical space, and the codpiece was squeezed out by another piece of stuffing rather than by an outbreak of modesty.

Two things follow. The codpiece was never underwear; it was outerwear over underwear, closer to a fly than a brief. And the idea that a garment can shape and display rather than merely cover is very old, which men were comfortable with long before anyone photographed a pole vaulter How Calvin Klein Sold Sex in 1982.

The fundoshi

Which brings us to the garment with the longest continuous life of any here, and the one usually handled worst by English-language writing about clothes.

The fundoshi is a Japanese undergarment made from a length of cloth, and before the Second World War it was simply what Japanese adults wore. Not a costume, not a ritual item, not a curiosity: standard underwear, across classes, for a very large population, for centuries.

There are several forms and the differences are functional. The rokushaku takes its name from its length of six shaku, about 1.82 metres, wrapped around the hips with the surplus passed between the legs; it is the athletic version and was the standard men's swimming garment. The etchū, named for the region near present-day Toyama, is a long rectangle with ties at one narrow end and is the simpler everyday form. The mokko and the kuroneko vary the cut and the coverage.

Consider what that design achieves in a hot, humid summer. It is one piece of cloth, so there are no seams to chafe and nothing to fail. It is adjustable to any body without sizing. It is trivial to wash and dries in an afternoon. It supports and ventilates at once, a combination modern manufacturers spend a great deal of money on The Sweat Article: Moisture-Wicking Fabrics, Explained Properly. It is not a primitive precursor to underwear. It is underwear, optimised for a climate by people who had been refining it for a very long time.

It fell out of general use quickly after the war, displaced by Western-style briefs and boxer shorts as part of a broader shift in Japanese dress. It did not disappear. It is worn at hadaka matsuri, it turns up in swimming and in traditional trades, and there is a small modern market for it as everyday underwear on exactly the comfort grounds above.

The honest way to file it is not as an exotic footnote to a Western story, but as one of the most successful undergarment designs in human history, which lost a market to imported fashion rather than to a better product Where the World Wears Briefs: An Atlas.

The union suit, and the strange century of covering everything

The nineteenth century did something odd, which was to cover the entire body in one garment and call it progress.

The union suit was patented in 1868 under the name "emancipation union under flannel", and its origins are in women's dress reform rather than men's comfort. Reformers wanted women out of corsets and layered petticoats, and a single knitted piece from neck to ankle was the answer. Susan Taylor Converse patented an improved version in 1875 as the emancipation suit, promoted by the New England Women's Club.

Men adopted it because it was warm and stayed put, and by the early twentieth century it was standard. Cooper's, later Jockey, built its business on the patented Kenosha Klosed Krotch union suit in the 1910s.

Then it went, fast. Central heating, lighter work, and a garment that was miserable in summer and had to come off entirely to do anything. What replaced it was the two-piece: a vest above and something short below A Field Guide to Vests: Singlet to Base Layer cotton ribbed vest. In 1935 Cooper's put the Y-front brief into Marshall Field's in Chicago and the modern category began The Y-Front at Ninety.

The shape keeps coming back

Set the sequence out and the pattern is hard to miss.

A hide strip between the legs on an Alpine man in the Copper Age. Linen with ties in Egypt. Cut and laced leather trunks in Roman London. Linen drawers under a medieval tunic. A length of cotton in Japan. And then, after a single peculiar century in which the West covered everything and regretted it, a short, close, supportive garment covering the same area as all of the above.

The brief is not a twentieth century invention that happens to be old-fashioned now. It is the default shape of human undergarment, arrived at independently by people with no contact with one another, because the problem never changed: hold and protect one part of the body, cover it, keep it dry, use as little material as the job requires, and get out of the way of everything else Brief, Slip, Tanga, Jock: A Field Guide to Supportive Underwear.

Boxer shorts, by that standard, are the anomaly. A loose leg that touches nothing and supports nothing is a very recent idea, dependent on cheap woven cotton and on a culture that decided support was slightly embarrassing.

So when a man says he finds briefs old-fashioned, he has the timescale wrong by about five thousand years The Case for Briefs: Why They Should Be Every Man's Default. A good combed cotton brief with a proper gusset is not a throwback combed cotton brief. It is the current draft of a design Ötzi, a Roman acrobat and a Japanese carpenter would each have recognised at a glance Anatomy of a Brief: Every Panel, Seam and Stitch Explained fine rib cotton brief.

Questions people ask

What did people wear as underwear before modern briefs?

Some form of loincloth, almost everywhere, for most of recorded history. Ötzi, who died around 3300 BC, wore a stitched sheep-hide strip passed between the legs and held by a belt. Egyptians wore linen loincloths with ties. Romans wore the subligaculum, ranging from a wrapped cloth to fitted leather trunks. Medieval Europeans wore loose linen braies. Japanese men and women wore the fundoshi. The one-piece union suit of the nineteenth century was the unusual chapter, not the loincloth.

What is a fundoshi and is it still worn?

A fundoshi is a traditional Japanese undergarment made from a length of cloth, worn by Japanese adults as standard underwear until the mid twentieth century. The main forms include the rokushaku, about 1.82 metres long and used for swimming and hard physical work, and the simpler etchū, a rectangle with waist ties. It was largely displaced by Western-style underwear after the Second World War, but survives at hadaka matsuri festivals and among people who prefer it for comfort in hot weather.

Was underwear found in Tutankhamun's tomb?

Yes. Alongside the treasure, the burial contained a large quantity of linen clothing, including more than a hundred and forty loincloths according to the Metropolitan Museum's records of the excavation. They were plain, three-cornered pieces of linen with ties, the everyday garment worn by Egyptians of every rank, packed so the king would have a clean supply in the afterlife. It is clear evidence that underwear was normal, routine and worth taking seriously.

What was a codpiece actually for?

Originally, to close a gap. As doublets shortened in the fifteenth century and men's hose were still two separate legs tied to a waistband, nothing covered the fork, and the codpiece began as a shaped flap tied across it. Only later did it become padded, decorated and competitive. It disappeared by about 1600, and research by Victoria Bartels at Cambridge argues it was crowded out by the fashion for a padded belly rather than abandoned out of modesty.

Are briefs a modern invention?

Only in their manufactured form. The Y-front brief dates from 1935, but the shape it takes, close and short and supportive over the same area of the body, is the one human beings have independently arrived at almost everywhere for thousands of years. The leather trunks recovered from a first century Roman well in London are cut and laced in a way any modern wearer would understand at once. The loose boxer short is the genuinely recent departure.

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