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How to Buy Briefs in a Shop Without Dying of Embarrassment
Buying underwear in person means bad light, sealed boxes and sizes that disagree. Four things your hands can learn that a photograph cannot, in ten minutes.
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Menswear is on the third floor. It is always on the third floor. You have come up two escalators, past a concession selling hard shell luggage to people who are not going anywhere, past a fragrance counter where a woman with a clipboard correctly identified you as not her problem, and you are now in front of a wall of small cardboard boxes in a corner of the building that natural light abandoned some time in the last century.
Nobody else is here. One other man, twelve metres away, is giving a dressing gown more attention than any dressing gown has ever deserved, and the two of you have entered a wordless agreement not to make eye contact until one of you leaves.
This is the underwear department. For a man who cares what he wears it is the most useful room in retail, because it is the only place on earth where you can pick a garment up before you buy it. It is also laid out, lit and staffed as though somebody had been briefed to design a space that would make him give up and order online instead.
I have given up and ordered online instead. Many times.
Why you had to walk so far
The distance is not personal. The usual retail account has it that shops put the things people come in specifically to buy at the very back, and the impulse items at the front, on the reasoning that a man who has decided he needs underwear will walk past forty departments to get it and may buy a scarf on the way. So underwear goes where the footfall is lowest, which is the far corner of the top floor, next to the lift nobody uses.
The department therefore feels like a place you are not supposed to be. It is quiet in the specific way a library is quiet. Every rustle of cellophane sounds like a firework.
That silence is not scrutiny, though. It is the opposite. You are standing on the least observed square of floor in the building, in a shop whose staff have watched several hundred men do exactly what you are about to do, and not one of them was memorable. The empty department is a gift. Use it slowly.
"Are you alright there?"
She will appear at the precise moment you are holding a pair of briefs up at eye level with both hands, turning them slightly, the way a man examines a wine glass for smears.
There is no version of this where the timing is good. It is a hard problem in retail choreography, because the assistant is trained to approach when a customer looks engaged with a product, and in this department looking engaged with a product means exactly one thing.
The instinct is to say "just looking" and walk to the socks. Do not. A real question converts you from a man behaving oddly near the underwear into a customer, which is a category she has tools for.
Three that work:
"Does this brand come up small?" She knows. She has processed the returns. Nobody understands a brand's sizing quirks better than the person who has spent two years listening to complaints about them.
"Is there anything in the stockroom in this size?" The wall is a fraction of the stock.
"Which of these do people come back for?" The best one. It bypasses the marketing entirely and asks about observed behaviour.
Say the words out loud. She has heard them a great many times before lunch and she has no interior life in which your visit features.
The box is designed so that you cannot learn anything
The packaging in this category is a small masterpiece of concealment.
You are offered a flat card sleeve, sealed in cellophane, printed with a photograph of a torso belonging to a man who does not have your job. The garment is folded so that a few square centimetres show through a window, and the part they have chosen to show you is the waistband, which is the part with the logo on it. The leg opening is invisible. The gusset is invisible. The seams, which are the best single predictor of whether you will still be wearing this in three years, are invisible Anatomy of a Brief: Every Panel, Seam and Stitch Explained.
Somebody made those decisions on purpose, and the purpose was not your benefit. So learn to read the formats, because they differ.
Sealed card sleeve, small window. The supermarket and high street default. Read the back of the sleeve, which usually carries the full composition and sometimes the country of manufacture, and treat the front as decoration.
Peg hang with a card clip. Folded around a card and clipped rather than sealed. This is the format you want, because you can lift the fold and see the leg opening and the inside of the side seam without damaging anything. Plenty of mid market brands use it and nobody exploits it.
Flat box, garment visible. Common on continental brands and the better British ones. You can see most of the front construction through the lid, and some are designed for inspection, which tells you who the maker expects to be buying Slip: Why European Briefs Fit Differently.
Do not tear anything open. But turning a clipped garment over in your hands is not vandalism, and the shop would far rather you did that than bought the wrong thing.
Sizes that do not agree with each other
Your trouser size is not your underwear size, and no two brands mean the same thing by medium.
This is the part with no elegant solution, because you cannot try underwear on and most retailers will not take it back once the packaging is open. So the decision has to be right the first time, on the shop floor, with your hands. Get it wrong and the pair does not go back, it goes to the back of the drawer, where it will sit for a decade waiting for a morning when you have run out of everything else The Emergency Pair: A Tribute.
Three things make it less of a gamble.
Know your waist measurement. Not your jeans, which lie, and not the size you wore at university, which is a historical document. Measure where you want the waistband to sit, for most men a little below the navel. Continental brands frequently size numerically, a 5, 6 or 7 rather than a letter, and those numbers map to measurements printed on the box.
Stretch the band against your own body. Hold the closed waistband across the front of your hips, over your clothes, and see how far you have to open it. If it reaches with a little to spare, that is your size. If you have to pull hard it will dig in, and if it hangs loose it will roll when you sit.
Buy one. Buying a pack of five of an unfamiliar brand throws away the advantage you walked up three floors to get Against the Multipack. Buy the single pair, wear it a week, go back for four more if it earns them.
The four things your hands can do that a photograph cannot
Everything above is the cost of being here. This is the payoff, because no amount of product photography substitutes for ninety seconds of contact with the object.
Feel the weight. Drape the garment over the back of your hand and let it hang. A light jersey follows the shape of your hand and feels like nothing. A heavyweight cotton rib has a definite fall to it and a slight resistance. Neither is better in the abstract, but weight is the hardest property to judge from a screen and the best predictor of how a garment will feel on a cold morning The Fabric Bible: What Your Briefs Are Actually Made Of.
Test the waistband recovery. Stretch a section of the band about ten centimetres and let it go. It should snap back instantly and completely. If it returns slowly, or comes back slightly longer than it started, the elastic is already tired and the garment will be loose within months Buy It Once: The Durability Guide to Briefs That Last Years.
Look at the leg opening edge. Hold it up to whatever light exists. Fabric turned over on itself and stitched is a folded hem, and folded hems eventually curl and rope across the thigh. A distinct strip wrapping the edge is a binding, and bindings do not.
Run a thumbnail along the inside seam. A ridge means overlock. No ridge means flatlock. On a garment worn for ten hours under a close cut trouser, that difference is the entire comfort question.
Four checks, ninety seconds, and you now know more about that garment than the product page will ever tell you.
The other thing you get is colour. Screens flatter everything and lie about most of it, and a deep burgundy on a website is frequently a slightly apologetic maroon in a room Why Men Are Frightened of Colour. A good combed cotton brief in an interesting colour is a far easier decision when the colour is in your hand.
The self-checkout, and the case against it
The machine will announce your purchase in a voice calibrated for a busy airport. Then it will decide that a cardboard sleeve weighing almost nothing is an unexpected item, refuse to proceed until a member of staff arrives, and set a light flashing above your head, a system engineered to summon the attention of the entire ground floor to a transaction you chose the machine to avoid discussing.
Go to the staffed till. The person on it scans the item in about four seconds and has no reaction, because they scan several hundred items a day and yours is not the interesting one. The self-checkout only feels private, and it is the least private thing in the building.
The ten minute method
Put together, it is a routine that produces better results than an hour of browsing at home.
1. Go on a weekday, mid morning or mid afternoon. The department is empty and the staff are not under pressure. 2. Walk the section once without touching anything, to see which brands allow inspection. 3. Pick three candidates in roughly the right size across different tiers, including at least one cheap one, because cheap is sometimes the right answer The Best Cheap Underwear That Is Not a False Economy. 4. Run the four hand checks on each: weight, waistband recovery, leg edge, seam ridge. 5. Ask the assistant one question about sizing. 6. Buy one pair of the winner. Not five. 7. Wear it for a week, then go back.
That last step is the one everybody skips and the one that makes the whole thing work. A week of wear tells you what the shop floor cannot: how it behaves after a wash, whether the leg rides, whether the waistband holds through a day of sitting How a Brief Should Actually Fit. If it passes, you can reorder that garment with total confidence for a decade.
What the walk actually buys you
The embarrassment is real and I am not going to pretend it away. It is also a construction of the retail environment rather than anything to do with you, the garment, or anybody else in the building. Somebody put menswear on the third floor. Somebody sealed the box. Somebody chose that voice for the machine.
What you get in exchange is the only reliable information in the category. Fabric weight, waistband recovery, leg finish and seam type decide whether a garment is a pleasure or a low grade irritation for three years, and none of the four can be conveyed by a photograph or a size chart. The screen tells you what a thing is made of. Only your hands tell you what it is like.
Go once a year. Find the two or three garments that work on you, whether that is a heavyweight cotton rib brief or something finer modal brief, then buy them by the armful from your sofa forever after The Drawer Audit: How Many Briefs You Need and When to Replace Them.
The third floor is not so bad. The lift is right there.
Questions people ask
Can you try on underwear in a shop before buying?
No. Retailers do not allow underwear to be tried on, and most will not accept a return once the packaging has been opened, for hygiene reasons. What you can do instead is hold the closed waistband across your hips over your clothes to judge the size, check your waist measurement against the figures printed on the box, and buy a single pair rather than a multipack until you know the brand fits you.
How do I know what size underwear to buy without trying it on?
Measure your waist where you want the waistband to sit, usually just below the navel, and use that number rather than your trouser size, which is often a size or two out. Check the measurement printed on the packaging rather than trusting the letter, because medium means different things to different brands. Continental brands frequently use numeric sizes such as 5, 6 or 7, which map to stated waist measurements. Between sizes, size up in cotton, which shrinks slightly, and down in a high elastane synthetic.
What should I check when buying underwear in person?
Four things, all of which take seconds. Drape the garment over your hand to judge fabric weight. Stretch about ten centimetres of waistband and confirm it snaps back instantly. Look at the leg opening edge to see whether it is a folded hem, which eventually curls, or a bound edge, which does not. Run a thumbnail along an inside seam to feel whether it is a raised overlock ridge or a flat flatlock join. None of these can be judged from a photograph.
Is it worth buying underwear in a shop rather than online?
For a brand you have never worn, yes, because fabric weight, waistband recovery, seam type and true colour are physical properties that product photography cannot convey and that determine whether you will still be wearing the garment in three years. Once you have handled a brand and worn a pair for a week, reordering online is straightforward and usually cheaper. The sensible pattern is one visit a year to identify what works, then online after that.
Why is menswear always at the back of the shop?
Because underwear and socks are destination purchases. Shops place items people come in specifically to buy furthest from the entrance, on the reasoning that a determined customer will walk past everything else to reach them and may buy something unplanned along the way. Impulse categories such as fragrance take the prime ground floor positions instead. It is a merchandising convention rather than anything to do with the products, and the upside is that the department is usually quiet.