An Apology to Every Pair of Briefs I Have Wronged
An apology to seven garments I destroyed through carelessness, and the laundry lesson buried in each. A care guide in the shape of a confession.
The Nine Men You Meet in Every Changing Room
A field taxonomy of the nine men in every changing room on earth, from the towel virtuoso to the sock archaeologist, and what each one knows that you do not.
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There is a municipal leisure centre near my house with a bench along the wall, twenty two lockers, a hand dryer that has never worked, and a laminated sign asking people not to shave in the sinks. The staff change, the paint changes, the sign gets replaced with a slightly angrier version of the same sign.
The men do not change.
Not the individual men. Those come and go. The types persist, the way the same nine birds turn up at the same feeder in every garden in the country. Cork, Coventry, Cologne: the same cast, the same arrangement, the same behaviour, and one of the few genuinely reassuring facts I know about our species.
What follows is a taxonomy. I am at least four of them, sometimes in one afternoon.
The Man Who Arrives Ready
He comes through the door already wearing the sport. Cycling kit, running kit, full football strip with shin pads in, and if there is a bag it contains a wallet and a set of keys. He uses neither locker nor bench. He passes through the changing room the way a train passes through a rural station, at speed, on the way to somewhere it actually wants to be. Ninety minutes later he leaves the same way, damp, in the same clothes, having touched nothing.
There is a purity to this that I have come to admire, because he has understood something the rest of us are still negotiating with: the changing room is not the event. He also tends to have got his layers right, having decided them at home with a mirror and no time pressure rather than on a bench while balancing on one leg.
One thing worth stealing from him. If he is a runner in proper split shorts, he is almost certainly wearing nothing underneath, and he is correct. Running shorts with a built-in liner already contain the supportive garment; adding a brief underneath gives you two waistbands, two sets of seams and a guaranteed chafe at the eight kilometre mark. If you dislike the liner, cut it out and wear a dedicated running brief instead Right Support, Right Sport: What to Wear for What You Do.
The Towel Virtuoso
He is performing a magic trick and he is very, very good at it.
The towel goes on before anything comes off. It stays on. Beneath it, unseen, an entire wardrobe is dismantled and rebuilt. Wet trunks descend and are somehow retrieved. Dry underwear ascends. At no point is there a gap, a slip, or frankly any evidence that a body is involved. Then the towel is whipped away and there he stands, fully dressed, as though he had been standing there fully dressed all along. I have watched this for two decades and still could not diagram it.
The virtuoso is not necessarily anxious, either. Plenty of men do it because it is faster, because the floor is wet, because they grew up somewhere it was simply how things were done The Unwritten Rules of the Communal Changing Room.
The technical observation is genuinely useful: the towel method is far easier with a brief than with anything long in the leg. A brief is a step-in garment with nothing to catch on. A boxer brief has two long legs of jersey that will grip a damp thigh and stop dead halfway up, at which point the towel is doing structural work it was never designed for. If you change under cover, you want the smallest, driest, simplest garment you own going on first.
The Man on Speakerphone
He is having a conversation with a colleague named Dave about a delivery that failed to arrive on Thursday, and everyone within nine metres is now also having that conversation.
He is not being rude. He does not experience the changing room as a social space with an audience in it; he experiences it as a corridor with lockers. Dave is the priority. The tiled walls, meanwhile, are doing something remarkable to the acoustics, so that Dave arrives with the resonance of a cathedral organ.
The comedy is that he is the one man in the room whose attention is entirely elsewhere, and therefore the only man in it who is not remotely self-conscious. He has accidentally solved the problem the rest of us read articles about The Locker Room Question: Getting Over the Fear of Being Seen in Briefs.
He also never forgets anything, and I say that with real respect. Men who take calls in changing rooms pack the night before. Same brain.
The Full Routine
Toner. There is a toner. It lives in a wash bag that stands up on its own, and out of it come three or four things applied in an order that has clearly been researched. The changing room does not know what to do with this and neither, initially, did I. The prevailing local assumption is that a man showers, does something perfunctory with a towel, and leaves.
He is right and the room is wrong. Pool water is chlorinated and hard on skin, sea water is worse, and both leave a residue that sits there for hours doing no good. A rinse and a moisturiser afterwards is maintenance, not vanity, and the same goes for the kit you were swimming in. A swim brief rinsed in fresh water for thirty seconds before it goes in the bag will comfortably outlive one that goes in chlorinated, because chlorine keeps working on elastane long after you have left the building Chlorine, Salt and Sun: How to Make a Swim Brief Last.
He has a routine for his face. Have one for your kit.
The Man Whose Kit Bag Has Outlived Three Cars
It is nylon, it is a colour that no longer exists commercially, and there is a school crest on it that has faded to a rumour. One zip works. He has had it since he was fifteen and he will have it when he is eighty. I love this man. In a category built on persuading you to buy things again, a bag that has done thirty years of service is a quiet moral victory.
The lesson in it is about what goes inside. Kit left damp in a closed bag from Tuesday to Thursday does not smell because the fabric is old. It smells because bacteria have had forty eight warm, wet, dark hours and have been thoroughly rewarded for their patience. Polyester holds onto the result particularly well, which is why a synthetic shirt can come out of the wash smelling clean and announce itself again ten minutes into the next session. Merino resists this markedly better, which is the actual reason people become evangelical about it The Sweat Article: Moisture-Wicking Fabrics, Explained Properly.
Get the kit out of the bag. That is the whole intervention. Keep the bag forever.
The Dryrobe
He has been in the sea. It is February. He is delighted about it and he wants, very gently, for you to know.
The dryrobe is a genuinely good piece of equipment and also, unavoidably, a flag. It says: I did the cold thing this morning, I am among the people who do the cold thing, and there is a WhatsApp group. He will be red to the shoulders, fogging the window behind him, and he will give you the water temperature with a precision that suggests a thermometer, because there was one. The room treats him as an exotic. He does not mind.
What he knows, and the rest of the room usually does not, is that cold water changing is a solved problem and the solution is a small garment. You can get a swim brief off and dry shorts on under a robe in about fifteen seconds, because there is nothing to peel The Sea Swimmer's Case for the Swim Brief. Cold hands cannot manage a drawstring or a wet waistband with a long leg attached. They can manage a brief. That is not a style argument, it is a dexterity one.
The Veteran
He is past sixty, he has been a member here longer than the building has been standing, and he is in the middle of the room, in his underwear, discussing the parking situation with a man he has known since 1988.
He is not unbothered in the sense of having overcome something. He is unbothered in the far more impressive sense of never having contracted it. The whole apparatus of changing room self-consciousness, the towel choreography, the strategic locker, the timing of the walk to the showers, never installed itself in him. Ask him why he wears what he wears and you get four words and an immediate return to the parking situation, which is the correct length of answer and one the rest of us take about thirty years to arrive at So Someone Asked Why You Wear Briefs.
Watch what he wears and you learn something about durability. Men like this tend to own eight pairs of the same brief from a house that has not changed the pattern in forty years, bought four at a time, worn in rotation, replaced when the waistband stops snapping back rather than when it looks tired. That is the whole drawer strategy, arrived at without reading anything The Drawer Audit: How Many Briefs You Need and When to Replace Them.
If you want the bearing, it is learnable, and it is mostly about walking at a normal speed The Locker Room Strut: A Field Manual.
The Sock Archaeologist
Bent double over an open bag, one hand in to the elbow, excavating.
He has found a sock. It is not the right sock. It is not even a sock from the correct decade. He holds it up, considers it, sets it on the bench with the air of a man cataloguing a find. The dig continues.
He will lose. He always loses. He will play five a side in a black sock and a navy sock and nobody will mention it, and if they did he would look down with genuine surprise, because the deep truth of the sock archaeologist is that he does not care, he simply enjoys the search.
The fix is almost insultingly simple. Stop buying socks in assorted packs and buy one model, in one colour, four or six pairs at a time. Every sock then matches every other sock, the sorting problem disappears, and the day one goes missing you have lost a sock rather than a pair. Do it separately for sport and for work, which want different heights anyway A Field Guide to Sock Heights: No-Show to Knee. If you play on grass, a proper wool sport sock will do more for your feet than most of what you have spent money on above the ankle merino sport sock.
The Man Who Is Clearly Having a Very Good Day
Something has gone right. You will not find out what.
He is whistling, badly, towelling his hair with real vigour, and he says something to the room about the weather that does not require an answer and gets one anyway from three separate people. He has taken four seconds off something. His team won. He got the promotion, or the scan came back clear, or he slept properly for the first time in a fortnight.
The changing room, generally a place where men are quiet and busy and slightly braced, absorbs him like a dropped stone. Everyone gets fractionally lighter. Someone who has not spoken in eleven visits makes a joke.
I have never once seen anyone resent this man, and that is worth sitting with. For all the anxiety we attach to these rooms, they are not hostile places. They are under-lit rooms full of people concentrating on the middle distance, and the moment one person breaks the silence in a good mood, the whole thing turns out to have been provisional.
The tenth man
You will have noticed the gap.
Every one of these portraits was written from a bench, which means somebody was sitting there cataloguing his neighbours instead of putting his shoes on. That man is the tenth type, he is worse than any of them, and he is the reason articles like this exist.
What twenty years of it has taught me is that the changing room is the only room most men enter regularly where the ordinary rules of privacy are suspended by mutual agreement, and it works, in every town, almost entirely without incident. Nine kinds of men with nothing in common undress within a metre of each other, and the arrangement holds up on nothing but good faith and a shared decision not to look.
The men who seem most at ease in there are not the fittest or the youngest. They are the ones wearing something they chose deliberately, at home, for their own reasons The Case for Briefs: Why They Should Be Every Man's Default. A good pair will not make you the veteran overnight cotton rib brief. It removes one more item from the list of things you are thinking about while you get your shoes on, and there are not many rooms where that is on offer navy microfibre sports brief.
Questions people ask
What should you wear under running shorts?
If your running shorts have a built-in mesh liner, wear nothing underneath them. The liner is the supportive garment, and adding underwear on top of it gives you two waistbands and extra seams, which is the commonest cause of chafing on longer runs. If your shorts have no liner, wear a single close-fitting sports brief in a synthetic or merino fabric. Avoid cotton, which holds sweat against the skin and stays wet.
How do you get changed in a communal changing room without feeling exposed?
Use a towel around the waist and put on the smallest, simplest garment first. A brief is far easier to manage under a towel than anything with long legs, because there is nothing to catch on damp skin. Stack your dry clothes on the bench in the order you will put them on before you start. Most of the discomfort comes from fumbling rather than from being seen.
Why does gym kit still smell after washing?
Because bacteria have been feeding on sweat in a warm, damp, closed bag, and synthetics such as polyester hold onto the resulting compounds more stubbornly than natural fibres do. Ordinary detergent often fails to shift them completely. Take kit out of the bag as soon as you get home, wash it promptly, skip fabric softener, which coats fibres and traps odour, and consider merino for base layers.
How many pairs of socks should I own and should they all match?
Buy one model in one colour, four to six pairs at a time, separately for sport and for work. Identical socks remove sorting entirely and mean a lost sock costs you one sock rather than a pair. Sport wants a cushioned wool or wool blend sock at ankle or crew height; office wear wants a finer sock over the calf so it stays up when you sit.