Things Men Say About Briefs, Ranked by How Wrong They Are
Eight myths about wearing briefs, ranked from the ones with a real point to the one stated with most confidence and least support. Fertility ranks worst.
A Letter to My Nineteen Year Old Self, Who Wore Boxers
Twenty pairs in the drawer and four he actually liked. A letter to a younger man on switching from boxers to briefs, waistbands, multipacks and false comfort.
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There is a chest of drawers in a rented house in a city I have not been back to, and in the second drawer down there are roughly twenty pairs of boxer shorts. I know the number because I once counted them while looking for the four I actually wore.
Four. Out of twenty. The other sixteen were in rotation only in the sense that they existed and were occasionally clean. Two had never been worn at all, because they came in a pack of five and I had liked three of the five, and it did not occur to me that this was a problem with the pack rather than a fact of nature.
I want to write to that man. Not to correct him exactly, and certainly not to laugh at him, because he was doing his best with the information available and the information available was terrible. But there are six things I would tell him, and any two of them would have made him meaningfully more comfortable for about eleven years.
You have twenty pairs and you like four
Start here, because everything else follows from it.
You did not buy twenty pairs. You bought four multipacks and a Christmas present, and each pack arrived containing one design you liked, one you tolerated, and one or two you would wear only on a day when everything else was in the wash and you had a lecture at nine.
You interpreted this as ordinary. You thought a drawer was supposed to contain a hierarchy: the good ones, the fine ones, and the ones at the back that were technically underwear. You had accepted, at nineteen, that roughly one day in four would begin with a small disappointment.
This is not how any other category of clothing works. You would not buy a pack of five shirts on the understanding that two of them would make you feel slightly worse. But underwear came in packs, and packs carried the assumption that the contents were interchangeable, so you never noticed you were paying for fabric you did not want in order to get the fabric you did Against the Multipack.
The correction is almost insultingly simple. Buy one pair. Wear it for a fortnight. If you still like it after fifteen washes, buy five more of exactly that. Every item in the drawer is then the best item, and Thursday is identical to Monday. It costs more per pair and less per year, and nobody tells nineteen year olds this because nobody told them either The Drawer Audit: How Many Briefs You Need and When to Replace Them.
You believed a thing about fertility that you never once checked
You did not read a study. You did not read a newspaper summary of a study. You heard it in a kitchen at a party from a man called Dave who was doing engineering, and Dave heard it from his older brother, and it entered your head as settled science and stayed there for a decade without once being asked to produce identification.
The specifics, if pressed, were: something about heat, something about airflow, and a general sense that the matter had been settled by people in white coats who had conveniently agreed with what you were already wearing.
There is real research in this area, and it is more careful, more equivocal and considerably more boring than the kitchen version Do Briefs Affect Fertility? What the Study Actually Says. What matters at nineteen is not the finding. It is that you were carrying a scientific belief you had acquired socially, in a room with music on, and using it to avoid examining a decision you had never actually made.
You will do this with other things too. That is the real lesson and it is not about underwear.
You thought comfort meant looseness
This is the deep one, and the one I have most sympathy for, because the logic is genuinely intuitive. More fabric, more room, less contact, therefore less to feel. It is a reasonable theory. It is how a duvet works.
It is not how a garment worn under a second garment works, and here is the part nobody explains: loose fabric under close fabric does not stay loose. It migrates. Every time you sit, the excess has to go somewhere, and where it goes is a fold, and folds under a trouser seam on a warm day are the entire source of the low-grade misery you spent your twenties assuming was just what legs felt like. The pattern is not hiding this from you either, since it is very nearly the pattern of a pyjama short, drawn for a man who intends to lie down The Boxer Short Is a Pyjama.
You half knew this. You had a specific pair of jeans you did not wear with a specific pair of boxers, and you had never asked yourself why you owned a combination of clothes that required a rule.
A loose boxer short is a genuinely good garment in the right context, and I do not want you to throw yours out In Praise of the Loose Boxer. Around the house, in bed, under a wide trouser on a hot Sunday, it is close to perfect. Under a slim jean for a fourteen hour day it is the wrong tool, which is not a failing on your part, just a thing you would have discovered in one afternoon if anyone had suggested trying.
Comfort under clothing comes from fabric that stays where it was put. That is the whole principle.
Fit is a measurement, and you have been treating it as a personality trait
You wore medium. You had always worn medium. Medium was, in your head, a fact about you, in roughly the same category as being left handed.
You had never measured your waist. Not once. Owning a tape measure would have struck you as a slightly odd thing to do about underwear, which only sounds reasonable if you have never noticed that the alternative is guessing, every time, for the rest of your life.
Size letters are not standardised between brands, between countries, or reliably within a single brand across a decade. A continental slip and a British brief with the same letter can differ by a full size in the waist. A number on a tape does not move. Measure at the point where the band actually sits, which is lower than where a tailor measures for a suit, then read the size chart, and when the chart disagrees with the letter you have worn since school, believe the chart.
There is a second measurement you have never heard of, which is rise: the distance from the waistband to the seam at the bottom of the front. It decides whether a garment sits where it should or spends the day quietly climbing. Two pairs with an identical waist and a different rise feel like different categories of object How a Brief Should Actually Fit.
Buy a tape measure. It will settle an argument you did not know you were having with every manufacturer on earth.
The waistband is the part that fails, and you have never looked at one
You threw pairs away when they went thin at the seat, or when the colour went, or when one of them acquired a hole in a place you did not want to explain to anyone.
That is not what killed most of yours. Elastic did. The waistband gave up gradually, so you never had a day where you noticed: it became a garment that needed hitching, then a garment you hitched without thinking, then a garment at the back of the drawer that you had stopped choosing without ever deciding to.
Two things did that, and both were you.
The first is the tumble dryer, which destroys elastic faster than years of wearing will. The heat does it. Nothing else in your laundry routine matters half as much How to Wash Underwear Properly.
The second is that you stretched the band to get the thing on. Everybody does. Thumbs in, pull wide, step through. Every repetition works the elastic slightly past its recovery point at the same two spots, which is why old waistbands go loose at the hips first.
There is a shop test that takes four seconds. Stretch about ten centimetres of the waistband and let go. It should come back instantly and completely. If it returns slowly, that garment is already partway through its life while still on the rail Anatomy of a Brief: Every Panel, Seam and Stitch Explained.
A well made combed cotton rib brief with a properly constructed band will outlast three cheap ones. That is the entire argument for spending more, and it is arithmetic rather than taste Buy It Once: The Durability Guide to Briefs That Last Years.
Nobody was looking
I have saved this one, because you will not believe it and it is the most useful thing on the page.
You had a mental image of a changing room in which men noticed. Not cruelly, not out loud, but they noticed and they filed it. You made clothing decisions in service of that room for years, about a garment that spends sixteen hours a day underneath two other garments.
The room does not exist. The real one contains men looking at the middle distance and thinking about a work email. In eleven years of managing that audience, the number of comments you received about your underwear was zero, which is also the number you made about anyone else's, and that should have been a clue The Locker Room Question: Getting Over the Fear of Being Seen in Briefs.
What you were afraid of was a joke format from a decade of television, absorbed at thirteen and never examined since. The men you were afraid of had absorbed the same thing and were, on the whole, also afraid of you.
What all of it cost, which was small and constant
Add it up honestly and it does not look like a tragedy. You were not in pain. You were fine. You were, at worst, in a state of mild daily friction: the adjust on the walk to the bus, the fold under the seam on the train, the day in four that started slightly wrong because of what was left in the drawer.
Call it three or four small negative moments a day for eleven years. None worth mentioning to anyone. All of them entirely optional.
The cost was never large enough to force a change and never small enough to be nothing, which is exactly the shape of problem people carry for decades. A large problem gets solved. A tiny one gets ignored. It is the middle ones that follow you around.
What I would actually have you do
Not a manifesto. One fortnight.
Measure your waist where the band sits. Buy one pair, in a dark colour, from a brand that describes its construction rather than its lifestyle navy fine rib brief. Wear it for a fortnight under your ordinary clothes, where there is no room and no audience, and pay attention to the small moments rather than the big impression Making the Switch: The 14-Day Brief Plan.
If it is better, buy five more of exactly that. If it is not, you have learned something for the price of one garment and can go back to the loose ones with an actual reason this time soft woven cotton boxer short.
Either outcome is a win, which is the part you cannot see at nineteen, because at nineteen a change of underwear feels like a statement. It is not. It is an experiment with a sample size of one and a two week runtime.
To him, at the end
I have been slightly hard on him and I want to take some of it back.
He was buying what was in the shop, in a country that had spent thirty years being told that one shape of underwear was for men and another was for someone to be laughed at, and he had no reason to suspect the advice was marketing. He was nineteen. He had rent, an essay, and a girlfriend who was about to end things. Underwear was the least of it, and it was reasonable of him to treat it as the least of it.
He also got things right that I have since had to relearn. He did not spend much. He did not care what the label said. He wore things until they were finished. When he did change his mind, he changed it quickly and without ceremony, which is better than most of what I have picked up since.
So: not a telling off. Just the note I wish someone had left in the second drawer down, between the four pairs he liked and the sixteen he did not.
Measure the thing. Buy one. See what happens.
Questions people ask
How do I know if I should switch from boxers to briefs?
Try one pair for two weeks under your ordinary clothes before deciding anything. The useful signal is not how the garment feels in the first ten minutes but whether you adjust less over a full day, particularly when sitting and when wearing closer fitting trousers. Loose boxers work well under wide legwear and around the house, and less well under slim jeans or a suit, where excess fabric folds at the seam.
What size underwear should I buy if brands keep varying?
Measure your waist with a tape where the waistband actually sits, which is lower than a tailoring measurement, then read the brand's size chart rather than trusting the size letter you have always worn. Size letters are not standardised across brands or countries, and continental sizing runs differently from British and American labelling. Check the rise too if it is listed, since two pairs with the same waist and a different rise fit very differently.
Why does the waistband on my underwear go loose before anything else?
Because elastic loses recovery faster than knitted cotton wears through, and two habits accelerate it. Tumble drying is the main culprit, since heat degrades elastane quickly. The second is stretching the band wide with both hands to pull the garment on, which works the same two points past their recovery limit. Wash cool, dry on a line, and test a band in the shop by stretching about ten centimetres and checking it snaps straight back.
Are multipacks of underwear bad value?
They are cheap per pair and often poor value per year. Most packs contain designs or colours you will not choose, so you are paying for garments that stay in the drawer, and pack construction is usually the cheapest available: fewer panels, no gusset, folded leg hems and low grade waistband elastic. Buying one pair, wearing it for a fortnight and then repeating that exact pair costs more up front and produces a drawer where every item is one you reach for.