The Best Underwear for Big and Tall Men
The best underwear for big and tall men: why waistbands roll, why sizing up rarely fixes the rise, and which brands grade width and length separately.
How a Boxer Brief Should Actually Fit
Ride up, bunching behind the knee, constant adjusting: the style is not the problem. How boxer briefs should fit, in four checks you can do standing up.
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The most-worn garment in the drawer is also the one men complain about most, and almost all of the complaints are the same complaint. It rode up. It gathered behind the knee. It had to be pulled back down in a lift with other people in it.
None of that is the boxer brief being a flawed design. It is the boxer brief being bought in the wrong size, or more often the right size in the wrong leg length, which is a number most brands do not bother to print anywhere a customer can see it. Fit is the whole product here even more than it is with a brief, because there is simply more garment available to get wrong How a Brief Should Actually Fit.
The four checks
The waistband sits on the hip bone and stays there. Same rule as every other style. Level all the way round, present without gripping, and in the same place after a flight of stairs as it was when you put it on. A boxer brief carries more weight of fabric than a brief does, so a thin or tired waistband gives up sooner and takes the rest of the garment down with it.
The leg ends below the widest part of the thigh, and lies flat there. This is the check nobody does and the one that decides everything. Run a hand down the outside of your thigh while standing. There is a point where the muscle stops widening and the leg starts tapering towards the knee. A hem that finishes above that point is being pushed upward by the shape of your own leg every time you take a step, and it will keep going until it finds somewhere it can stay. A hem that finishes below it has nowhere to climb to.
The seat is covered and stays covered. Squat down. If fabric pulls tight across the back and the leg hems drag upward as you go, the garment is too small through the seat regardless of what the waist measurement says. Boxer briefs fail here more often than briefs do, because the leg gives the seat somewhere to steal fabric from.
Nothing gathers behind the knee or bags at the inner thigh. A little slack is normal in a woven-feel cotton. A visible pouch of loose fabric at the back of the leg means the leg is cut too wide for you, and it will be worse under a trouser than it is standing in front of a mirror.
Leg length is the decision, not the size
If you take one thing from this article, take this. Most men who are unhappy in boxer briefs are wearing the correct waist size in a leg that is too short for their thigh.
Inseams in this category run from roughly ten centimetres to roughly twenty. The short end is often sold as a "trunk-style" boxer brief, the long end as "long leg" or, in sportswear, as a nine-inch. Between those extremes is an enormous amount of variation that brands do not standardise and rarely publish. Two pairs both labelled medium, both from reputable makers, can differ by six centimetres of thigh, and that is the difference between a garment that stays put and one that does not. If the short end is where you keep landing, the honest answer may be that you want a trunk rather than a boxer brief pretending to be one The Best Trunks You Can Actually Buy.
The rough guide: taller men and men with fuller thighs want the long end, and both for the same reason, which is that the widest point of the thigh sits further down the leg than the pattern cutter assumed. Shorter men and men with slim legs are usually better served in the middle, because a long leg on a short thigh ends up sitting near the knee, where it will roll.
When a brand does print an inseam, believe the number over the photograph. Underwear is nearly always photographed on a model who is taller than average, which makes every leg look shorter than it will be on most people.
Where the ride-up actually comes from
Four causes, in the order they are likely.
The leg is too short for your thigh, as above. This is most of it.
The leg opening has no grip. A plain hemmed edge on a stretchy fabric has nothing holding it in place except friction. A band of silicone on the inside of the hem, or a wide flat elastic sewn into it, is what stops the migration, and it is a genuine difference in construction rather than a marketing line. If you have one pair that behaves and one that does not, turn both inside out and look at the hems.
The whole thing is a size too small. Undersized boxer briefs ride because there is not enough fabric to go round, and the leg is the only part that can move.
The fabric has no recovery. Cheap cotton with too little elastane fits at breakfast and is a size larger by lunch, at which point it is a loose garment on a moving leg and it will do what loose garments on moving legs do The Sweat Article: Moisture-Wicking Fabrics, Explained Properly.
Notice that none of the four is your body. Ride-up is not something that happens to certain men and not others. It is something that happens to certain garments.
What the fabric changes
Cotton with three to five percent elastane is the comfortable default and the one most likely to sag late in the day. Buy it slightly snug rather than slightly loose cotton stretch boxer brief.
Modal and micro-modal drape closer, feel considerably softer and hold their shape better than cotton at the same price. Under a slim trouser they are the ones that disappear.
Merino behaves differently again. It relaxes when warm and recovers when it cools, which reads as forgiving rather than saggy, and it is the fabric to own if the garment has to survive a long walk or three days in a rucksack merino boxer brief.
Pure synthetics have the most reliable stretch recovery of the lot and the worst behaviour on smell, which is exactly the trade you want in the gym and exactly the wrong one at a desk.
The one honest test
Buy one pair, in a long leg, from a brand that publishes its inseam. One pair, not a multipack, because a multipack of the wrong leg length is twelve identical disappointments long leg boxer brief.
Wear it for a day that involves stairs, a car or a bus, and at least a couple of kilometres on foot in warm conditions. At the end of it, check where the hems are without adjusting them first. If they are within a centimetre or two of where they started, you have found your leg length and you can buy the rest with confidence. If they have climbed, go longer before you go bigger, because size is the thing most men change and length is nearly always the thing that was wrong.
A boxer brief that fits is a garment you will not think about once between getting dressed and getting undressed. That is the standard, and it is achievable in one purchase The Boxer Brief Won, and It Deserved To.
Questions people ask
Why do my boxer briefs ride up my thighs?
Nearly always because the leg is too short to sit below the widest part of your thigh, so every step pushes it upward until it finds somewhere to rest. The other common causes are a hem with no silicone or elastic grip inside it, a size too small, and a cheap fabric that has lost its recovery. Try a longer leg before you try a bigger size.
How long should the leg of a boxer brief be?
Long enough to finish below the point where your thigh stops widening, which for most men is somewhere between fourteen and twenty centimetres of inseam. Taller men and men with fuller thighs need the longer end. If a brand publishes the number, use it, because the photograph on the packet is taken on a model taller than you.
Should boxer briefs be tight or loose?
Snug everywhere and tight nowhere. Close enough that the fabric follows the body without slack at the inner thigh or behind the knee, loose enough that the waistband leaves no red trench and the leg openings leave no mark. A loose boxer brief performs like a badly cut boxer short and gives you none of the support you paid for.
What size boxer brief should I buy?
Measure your waist where the band will actually sit, which is lower than a trouser measurement, and use the brand's own chart rather than the size you have been buying since university. If you are between sizes, size down in cotton with elastane and stay true in modal or merino. Then treat leg length as a separate decision, because it is one.