The Best Trunks You Can Actually Buy
The best trunks for men, judged on the only thing that matters: whether the leg stays put. Six pairs from Swiss cotton to supermarket, weaknesses included.
The Best Boxer Briefs You Can Actually Buy
Six boxer briefs worth owning, from German cotton that outlasts your trousers to a cheap synthetic that is genuinely good. Each with its honest weakness.
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Every man who wears boxer briefs has done the same small thing. Halfway up the stairs at a station, or twenty minutes into a walk in July, a hand goes into a pocket and pulls a leg back down. Nobody talks about it. It is treated as a fact of life, like rain.
It is not a fact of life. It is a design failure, and the single most useful thing to test a boxer brief against, because a pair that stays where you put it has got the fabric, the leg finish and the cut right, and a pair that crawls has got at least one of them wrong.
Six of them follow, chosen to cover different problems rather than to fill a list. Each entry says what it is made of, who it suits, and where it falls down, because everything falls down somewhere. No scores and no prices, partly because prices move and mostly because a number would let you skip the reading.
Schiesser, for the pair you stop thinking about
The German answer, in production since 1875 in Radolfzell, and the reason half of central Europe has an unexamined confidence about underwear.
Schiesser's cotton boxer briefs are built the way German knitwear has always been built: a dense cotton jersey with a small percentage of elastane for recovery, a wide covered waistband rather than a branded exposed one, a proper gusset, and a leg opening finished so that it lies flat instead of curling. The whole garment is engineered to be identical after two hundred washes, which is an unfashionable ambition and an expensive one.
The cut is a genuine mid rise with a full seat, and the leg is longer than current fashion, which is exactly why it does not ride. This is the pair you buy six of and forget about for five years, which is a financial argument rather than a sentimental one Buy It Once: The Durability Guide to Briefs That Last Years Schiesser cotton boxer brief.
Where it falls down: it is cotton, so it holds sweat, and on a hot commute it will still be damp at lunchtime. The styling is conservative to the point of being invisible, the colour range is mostly white, navy and grey, and the sizing is numeric, which trips up first-time buyers who convert from their trouser size instead of measuring Slip: Why European Briefs Fit Differently.
Icebreaker Merino 150 Anatomica, for heat, cold and not doing laundry
Merino does something no other fabric in this category does, and Icebreaker's Anatomica line is the most widely available version of it done properly. The published composition is roughly 83 percent merino with nylon and elastane making up the rest, at a fineness of about 19 microns. Both numbers matter. The nylon is there because pure merino at underwear weight wears through at the thigh in a season; the micron count is there because anything coarser itches.
What you get is a garment that regulates rather than insulates. It is comfortable across a wider band of temperature than any cotton, it holds a startling amount of moisture before it feels wet, and it does not develop a smell, which means it can be worn several days running without anybody knowing. For travel, hiking and any trip where washing is a nuisance, it has no real competition The Best Merino Underwear.
Where it falls down: it is delicate. Even with nylon in the blend, the inner thigh goes first, and a heavy walker will wear a hole there long before the waistband gives up. It costs several times what a good cotton pair costs. It is slower to dry than a polyester equivalent, so it is wrong for a wash-in-the-sink-overnight routine in humidity. And it needs storing somewhere moths are not merino boxer brief.
Icebreaker Merino 150 Anatomica Boxers
Bread and Boxers, for the sensible middle
Founded in Sweden in 2008 by two men who had lost their luggage and thought hard about it afterwards, Bread and Boxers makes plain organic cotton basics with no external branding, which is a mercy in a category that has spent forty years shouting.
The everyday cotton boxer brief is the argument for the middle of the market. Soft organic cotton with enough elastane to hold shape, a flat waistband that is comfortable under a belt, a modest leg length that sits above the widest part of most thighs. Nothing here is exotic. It is well made at a price that does not require a discussion with anybody, and a considerable step up from what a supermarket multipack will do Against the Multipack.
Where it falls down: it is soft rather than dense, which is lovely for the first year and less impressive in the third. The colour palette is deliberately dull. And the cut is drawn for a fairly slim leg, so if your thighs are the reason your last pair rode up, this will not solve your problem.
Bread and Boxers cotton boxer brief
Uniqlo AIRism, the cheap one that is genuinely good
There is a persistent snobbery about cheap underwear, and in the case of the AIRism boxer brief it is simply wrong.
The fabric is a fine polyester knit with a high elastane content, published on the product pages as around 88 percent polyester and 12 percent spandex, with a nylon and elastane waistband. It is engineered to move sweat off the skin rather than absorb it, knitted thin enough to be almost weightless, and contoured at the front rather than flat. It dries in a couple of hours on a radiator. In a British summer or a hot office it will outperform every cotton pair here, at a fraction of the cost.
If you want one pair to test whether you actually like the style before committing money, buy this one Uniqlo Airism vs Marks and Spencer: Which Everyday Brief Wins?.
Where it falls down: polyester holds odour in a way cotton and wool do not, so it needs washing after every wear without exception. The thin fabric is not durable in any absolute sense; expect a year or two rather than five. The waistband relaxes first. And in genuine cold it feels clammy rather than warm, because a fabric optimised to move moisture also moves heat.
Runderwear, for the sports that punish you
Some garments exist to solve exactly one problem, and running underwear is the clearest example. Runderwear is a British brand that knits seamless synthetic base layers on circular machines, so the leg and body come off as a single tube with no side seams at all.
No side seams means no ridge on the inner thigh, which is where every long run goes wrong. The leg is cut long and the fabric grips lightly enough not to migrate over twenty kilometres. For running, cycling under shorts, and anything involving hours of repeated friction, seamless construction is not a marketing word; it is the entire product Right Support, Right Sport: What to Wear for What You Do.
Where it falls down: it is a specialist garment and it feels like one. There is no fly on most of the range. The seamless knit is thin and does not last as long as a cut and sewn pair, especially if you tumble dry it, which you should not. The fit is compressive in a way some men dislike immediately. And it is poor value for everyday use, because you are paying for engineering you are not using seamless running boxer brief.
Runderwear seamless boxer brief
CDLP, for wearing under a suit
Founded in Stockholm in 2016 and manufactured in Portugal and Italy, CDLP built its proposition on lyocell, a fibre regenerated from wood pulp in a closed loop process. Whatever you make of the sustainability argument, the fabric behaves in a way that matters here.
Lyocell drapes. It has a fluid, slightly cool hand closer to silk than to jersey, it does not cling to itself, and it is smooth enough that nothing prints through a fine wool trouser. The branding is minimal and the waistband is designed to disappear. If your complaint has ever been that you can see your own underwear through your suit, this is the fibre that fixes it Briefs for the Office: The Tailoring Argument.
Where it falls down: lyocell is weaker when wet than cotton is, which makes it less forgiving of aggressive washing and much less forgiving of a hot dryer. It is expensive for what is, structurally, a fairly simple garment. The cool hand that is a virtue in August is a liability in February. And the muted colours fade sooner than a good cotton would lyocell boxer brief.
Who should not buy which
The most useful part of any roundup is the part that tells you to walk away, so here it is in one place.
Do not buy Schiesser if you run hot, sweat heavily or want your underwear to be interesting. It is a fabric-first, longevity-first garment and it concedes nothing to either heat or fashion.
Do not buy merino if you are hard on your clothes. Men who walk twenty thousand steps a day in work trousers destroy merino underwear, and there is nothing wrong with the garment when that happens; it is the wrong tool. Look at a heavy cotton or a nylon blend instead The Working Man's Brief: Underwear for the Site, the Van and the Ten-Hour Shift.
Do not buy Bread and Boxers if you have heavy thighs or a long torso. The cut is drawn for a slim average frame and has neither the leg length nor the seat volume to cope with much deviation.
Do not buy AIRism if you want to wear a pair twice, if you are buying for a cold climate, or if you already know that polyester and your skin do not get along. A minority of men react to synthetics and no engineering changes that.
Do not buy Runderwear unless you run, ride or otherwise sweat for hours. As everyday underwear it is expensive, fragile and slightly odd.
Do not buy CDLP if your washing routine involves a tumble dryer, if you want warmth, or if you were hoping the premium buys durability. It buys drape.
What a boxer brief has to get right
Strip away the brands and four things decide whether a pair works, all checkable before you buy.
Leg length relative to your thigh. A boxer brief rides because the hem sits on the widest part of the thigh, where every step forces it upward. The fix is not a tighter leg but a longer one, so the hem sits below the widest point, or a genuinely shorter one that stays above it. The middle is the failure zone How a Boxer Brief Should Actually Fit.
Leg finish. A folded and stitched hem will eventually curl and rope. A bound edge, a flatlock, a raw laser cut edge or a knitted-in band will not. Turn the garment inside out in the shop and look.
The front. A flat panel with the shaping delegated to stretch is cheap construction whatever the label says. A contoured front built from separate panels holds a shape from new and keeps holding it.
Waistband recovery. Stretch ten centimetres of it and let go. If it does not snap back instantly, the garment is already ageing on the shelf.
The honest conclusion
If you buy one pair from this list, buy the cheap one. Not because it is the best garment here, which it plainly is not, but because a single AIRism pair will tell you within a week whether your problem is the category or the specific pairs you already own. That is worth more than an expensive guess.
If you buy six, buy the Schiesser, and accept that you are choosing longevity over excitement. Underwear is the one clothing category where the boring answer is almost always correct, because the garment is not seen, the failure modes are physical rather than aesthetic, and the reward for buying well compounds every day for years.
And if none of these solve the riding problem, the honest answer may be that the style is wrong for your build rather than the pair. A shorter leg cannot ride if there is no leg to ride, which is the entire argument for the trunk, and a brief has no leg at all The Best Trunks You Can Actually Buy.
Questions people ask
What is the best boxer brief material for everyday wear?
For most men, a cotton knit with three to five percent elastane is the right everyday fabric: breathable, comfortable across a normal day, and durable if the knit is dense. Choose a fine polyester or modal blend instead if you run hot or work in an overheated building, and choose merino if you travel, wear a pair for more than one day, or need one garment for cold mornings and warm afternoons.
Why do my boxer briefs ride up my thighs?
Almost always because the leg hem sits on the widest part of your thigh, so every stride pushes it upward until it settles above that point. The cure is a longer leg finishing below the widest point, not a tighter one. A folded and stitched hem makes it worse because it curls and grips after washing, while a bound or flatlocked leg opening stays flat.
How many pairs of boxer briefs should I own?
Enough to cover your longest realistic gap between washes plus a margin, which for most people means somewhere between ten and fourteen pairs. That lets you wash weekly without rationing and stops any single pair being worn hard enough to fail early. Rotating more pairs extends the life of all of them, because elastic recovers between wears rather than being worked constantly.
Are expensive boxer briefs actually worth it?
They are worth it if you keep clothes and wash them sensibly, because the money goes into cotton grade, knit density and elastic quality, all of which show up as lifespan rather than as a feeling on day one. They are not worth it if you tumble dry everything, replace your drawer on a whim, or are buying for a sport, where a cheaper technical garment will outperform a costly cotton one.
What is the difference between boxer briefs and trunks?
Leg length, and nothing else that matters. A trunk is a boxer brief with the leg cut short, finishing high on the thigh rather than partway down it, which gives a squarer look under close trousers and removes the riding problem by removing the leg. Boxer briefs give more coverage, more chafe protection on long days and more support for sport; trunks give a cleaner line and less fabric in hot weather.